Articles Tagged with “Future”
09/03/2008: The Semantic Web
One of my current interests is the semantic web — that is, the push to move from publishing text on the Web to publishing structured data, which can actually be understood by computers (in so far as a computer can truly “understand” anything). By publishing information so that computers can understand it, you make the Web into a huge mine of interconnected data, free to be queried by everyone.
As an example of what I mean, searching for the keyword “train” on Google brings up results related to:
- trains, as a form of transport
- the band Train
- IT training courses
- toy trains
In the semantic web, the search engine and my computer would inherently understand the difference between these concepts, so if I wanted to know about the new Train album, I wouldn’t get any result related to locomotives!
What I’m particularly interested in is ways of embedding semantic data in ordinary web pages, so that we have a single web that can be…
09/03/2008: The Great IE8 Meta Tag Climb Down
Yeah, so I know I’m about a week late in mentioning this (I’ve been busy — let’s hope nobody is using this blog as their primary source of news), but the Microsoft Internet Explorer team have backed down on their ridiculous META tag idea.
Read about it on IEblog.
06/02/2008: The Great IE8 Meta Tag Debacle
So Microsoft, in conjunction with some of the folk at WaSP, has announced its intention to include the quirks mode that beats all quirks modes in the forthcoming Internet Explorer 8 in an article on A List Apart: Beyond DOCTYPE: Web Standards, Forward Compatibility, and IE8.
This has proved to be quite a controversial idea. It was not long before WaSP issued a release hinting that many WaSP members do not support the idea. Speaking in favour of the scheme we have:
- In Defense of Version Targeting by Jeffery Zeldman
- From Switches to Targets: A Standardista’s Journey by Eric Meyer
And against, we have…
05/02/2008: Looking Ahead to Perl 6
One of the most important changes in Perl 6 over earlier versions is that it has started out as a written specification, which may end up with several different implementations. In previous versions of Perl, alternative versions had to implement all the quirks of the official Perl interpreter, as the definition of the Perl language was “whatever the Perl interpreter will interpret”, which was (of course) a moving target, as each released version introduced new features and changed existing behaviour (though usually only on the peripheries of the language). The lack of a stable written specification killed off many useful projects, such as the Perl compiler (perlcc).
The written specification is what allows me to write this article right now, as the current implementations of Perl 6 are only partial — indeed, the specification is not yet complete, but I can comment on those parts that have been written. There are way too many changes to touch on them all, but I’ll try to write about some of the most…
03/02/2008: The World in 2050?
I drew this map and wrote the skeleton of this article in November, but have only recently gotten around to finishing it…
Empires
The US is occasionally referred to as “the only remaining global superpower”. By 2050, I believe that it will still be a superpower, but that others will have risen to join it.
The United States
The US will keep military bases in the middle east, even if its original reason to do so (namely oil) has diminished by the middle of the 21st century.
The European Union
Growing co-operation between member states, a strengthening European Parliament and weakening national parliaments will have transformed Europe into effectively one country, even if officially the member states retain some form of soverienty. Most importantly, by 2050…
29/01/2008: Looking Ahead to PHP 6
This is my look at what’s planned for the forthcoming revision to the PHP language.
Removal of Deprecated Features
PHP 6 includes a lot of tidying up, removing features of the language that have caused annoyance, confusion and security headaches. Although these changes are too numerous to list here, and the list will probably change before the official release, here are three of the major ones:
- PHP has for some time included two different regular expression libraries: POSIX Regex and PCRE. PCRE is both faster and more capable, so in PHP 6, the POSIX Regex library will be removed from the PHP core and exist only as an optional extension.
- PHP includes a feature called register_globals, which automatically creates global variables for any data provided to a script through an HTTP…