News Highlights for 12.17.07: IE8 & Firefox 3, Web Service Privacy and Amazon SimpleDB
Will the next browser war focus on Web Standards?
The future is looking bright for web developers. IE8 has passed the Acid2 test. Firefox 3 also passed a little while back. As a web developer this is very encouraging. I believe that the standardization of the web has played a big role in the development of the technologies and patterns which drive much of what we consider to be “Web 2.0″. Whether those standards come about in an organized fashion (like the W3C DOM) or they are adopted organically by the market (like the adoption of Microsoft’s XMLHttpRequest). Once developers can stop focusing on how to build something and spend more time on what to build great things start to happen.
Internet Explorer 8 and Acid2: A Milestone
Firefox 3.0: Passes Acid 2 CSS Test
Privacy in the world of web services
Kent Brewster over at kentbrewster.com has a couple of articles on how developers can see if user are logged into Nextflix or Facebook. The approach involves pinging the site’s JavaScript services and looking at the result to determine the users logged in state. I’ve got to hand it to Kent on his creativity.
This seems to be raising some issues around privacy. I personally don’t see the big issue. If the services used in Kent’s examples are not intended to share information with the public, then the service simply contains a design flaw and should incorporate some sort of authentication token as an input to its service calls. If these services are meant to share information with the public, for example they could be used in a mashup to gather presence information for users of a site, then there is not any notion of privacy with the service to begin with.
How to Tell if a User is Logged In to Facebook
How to Tell if a User is Logged In to Netflix
SimpleDB, Amazon’s latest web service
Amazon latest web service is SimpleDB. Its in a limited (read private) beta at the moment. However you can sign yourself up and get on the weighting list. I received the following message after signing up:
The Limited Beta will be opened to the public in the next few weeks. We will contact you via e-mail when the beta program opens and a spot becomes available.
The service does sacrifice some flexibility for scalability. There is a great overview at snarfed.org which I encourage you to check out.
Amazon SimpleDB Developers Guide
Amazon SimpleDB Thoughts (snarfed.org)
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