Developer tools

Adobe Systems has proposed a standard that could make it easier to create Web pages with fancy layouts seen more often in magazines.

The company proposed a technology it calls CSS Regions (PDF) yesterday to the World Wide Web Consortium, which standardizes the Cascading Style Sheets technology widely used to control formatting on Web pages. Adobe also described the technology at a CSS Working Group meeting in Silicon Valley.

"This proposal is intended to support sophisticated, magazine-style layouts using CSS," said Arno Gourdol, director of engineering for runtime foundation at Adobe, in a mailing list posting.

The proposal … Read more

Steve Jobs thinks that HTML5 is the future of media-rich content on the Web, and eventually he might be right. But Web designers and their clients are working with Flash now, so to address this schism between the two, Adobe Labs today unveiled a new free tool called Wallaby that will convert Flash into HTML5.

Originally demonstrated at Adobe's MAX 2010 conference, the conversion process is currently workable but rough, said Adobe Flash Professional Senior Product Manager Tom Barclay. "HTML5 will be an important technology for banner ads and Web publishing," he said but cautioned that Flash … Read more

Stack Exchange, the company behind Stack Overflow, the influential-among-programmers Q&A site, is taking another stab at a revenue model for the service by launching a jobs board for its users at the Launch Conference in San Francisco today. It's the first presenting company at this conference. (There is a live video feed from Launch on Ustream.)

Previously, Stack Exchange had charged for the hosting of "white label" Q&A sites, but that model didn't work. In April of 2010 the Stack Exchange sites became free. Influence of the Stack Overflow site (the biggest … Read more

Google has passed a significant milestone with the release of its first version of Native Client, a software foundation designed to let Web-based applications tap into a person's computer chip.

The software, called Arctic Sea, is available built into Chrome 10, which entered beta testing yesterday. "A big goal of this release is to enable developers to start building Native Client modules for Chrome applications," product manager Christian Stefansen said of the Native Client release in a blog post today.

Native Client--NaCl for short--is an unusual approach to the challenge of letting people download software over the … Read more

It's been a work in progress for years, but there are a few more years to go yet before the next version of Hypertext Markup Language is finalized.

Specifically, the World Wide Web Consortium's HTML Working Group is set to announce today that it expects to anoint HTML5 as an officially recommended standard in the second quarter of 2014. That drawn-out schedule contrasts with another effort to make HTML a more fluidly updated "living standard."

"We started working [on HTML5] in 2007," Philippe Le Hegaret, the HTML activity leader for the W3C, told CNET. &… Read more

PicPlz, a photo-sharing start-up, has released a programming interface that lets applications tap into its tools for uploading and applying artistic filters to images.

"We think that allowing developers access to our upload and filter pipeline brings something different to the table than "just another photo-sharing API,'" the company said in a blog post yesterday. "We're pleased to announce that in the past 2 weeks we've had well over 100 developers apply to be part of our API (far exceeding our expectations)."

Opening an API lets programmers tap into the abilities of a … Read more

AT&T has officially opened its first Foundry facility aimed at increasing innovation in the mobile market. One of three such planned facilities around the globe, this one is in Plano, Texas, the company announced today.

The center will facilitate the company and mobile developers working together to "speed the pace of innovation to consumers and enterprises," the carrier said. The center is opening with expected development in rich media, HTML5, and location-based applications, among other areas.

Ultimately, AT&T's goal with its innovation centers is to get projects that might improve the use of … Read more

There was a day when exploring that famed fractal, the Mandelbrot set, took a supercomputer. Now Google has created a Web application that--while not the highest-performing or most subtly-shaded rendering of this surreal mathematical landscape--shows the browser can now outdo the supercomputers of yore.

The Julia Map project uses a newer Web standard called Web Workers that lets the browser perform background processing tasks in parallel with the more ordinary user-interface chore in the forefront of a browser's thoughts, so to speak.

The Mandelbrot set is a close relative of another fractal called the Julia set; Google's application … Read more

Facebook has released a benchmark designed to help developers test just how powerful desktop and mobile browsers are at running a new generation of games built with a new generation of Web standards.

One of the most important of those standards is the JavaScript programming language, which is ubiquitous on the Web and ever faster in browsers. Enter Facebook's JSGameBench, designed specifically for measuring game issues such as displaying "sprites," the graphics out of which animated characters are made.

"Although there are many other benchmark suites that measure JavaScript performance, we wanted to build one focused … Read more