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BARCELONA, Spain--Jeff Jaffe's job requires both patience and impatience.

Patience, because the World Wide Web Consortium--of which he's been chief executive for nearly a year--is an unwieldy standards group trying to encompass the disparate agendas of dozens of companies.

And impatience, because if the W3C doesn't move fast enough, the Web will move on without it.

It was clear from an interview with CNET that Jaffe is trying to strike the right balance. The W3C is tackling a range Web standards from the newer idea of augmented reality to the politically charged overhaul of HTML, the … Read more

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

This week we're buried under a ton of Apple news. We have new test results for the MacBook Pro and 13-inch MacBook Air, plus there's the new iPad 2 to talk about. Later, Charlie Sheen goes rogue on Ustream, and we ask if celeb Web-casting is the ultimate end-run around the studio system?

Bonus: You can download the show's theme song as a free MP3 here for a limited time!

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Links from Tuesday's episode of Loaded:

Warner Bros. is renting out movies inside Facebook

The beta of Google Maps Navigation for Android helps you avoid traffic jams

YouTube acquires Next New Networks

HBO is said to be relaxing black-out agreements to advance UltraViolet cloud streaming

This year's Wimbledon finals will be broadcast in 3D

Owners of the original iPad 3G will be able to port their unlimited data plans over to the new iPad 2

Consumer Reports finds that 30 percent of teens are texting while driving

The World Wide Web Consortium has approved and published a new browser privacy feature from Microsoft, according to a new IE blog post, opening up for discussion and debate whether the feature should become a Web standard.

Found in the recent release candidate of Internet Explorer 9, Microsoft's new Tracking Protection Lists offer IE users a type of "do not track" feature to help them block advertisers and Web sites from tracking and capturing certain data. The feature works via lists of Web site domains that are downloaded to the browser. If a domain name is on … Read more

This week: In celebration of Valentine's Day, we look at some of the timely press swag that has turned up in our office. Scott talks about his visit to Toy Fair, and we play some more tech trivia with the chat room.

Bonus: You can download the show's theme song as a free MP3 here for a limited time!

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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

This week we recap the best and worst high-tech ads from the Super Bowl, then debate the surprisingly high price of the Xoom tablet. There's plenty of media news as well, with The Daily launching for the iPad and AOL picking up the Huffington Post.

Finally, we play another round of our new tech trivia game, with Joey, Scott, and Julie playing to win prizes for chat room participants. Tune in live every week at 3 p.m. ET/12 p.m. PT for your chance to play. The game is new, and doesn't have a proper name yet, but we're thinking of calling it Office Dummies, after our favorite Twitter feed.

Bonus: You can download the show's theme song as a free MP3 here for a limited time!

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We get started this week just in time to follow Intel's major Sandy Bridge chipset crisis. How will this affect review systems we're testing in the Lab? Tune in to find out. Then we answer some popular reader questions about when to buy a laptop and when to wait, especially with rumors of a MacBook refresh in the air.

Finally, it's time to clean out the old game closet, and we try a new chat room contest, rewarding correct tech trivia answers with games.

Bonus: You can download the show's theme song as a free MP3 here for a limited time! Also, if you're a fan of Dan's previous jazz/funk/indie albums, check out some rough mixes from his new bossa-nova-inspired project.

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