The future of the RSS/News aggregator

weblogs / By

Interesting discussions going on. Dave Winer is writing up a document called “What is a News Aggregator?” A news aggregator is a piece of software that periodically reads a set of news sources, in one of several XML-based formats, finds the new bits, and displays them in reverse-chronological order on a single page. Deus X (0xDECAFBAD) takes things a bit futher, wanting to redefine the News Aggregator: Aggregators desperately need to grow toward more flexibility and scan-ability. A few things I’d really like to see addressed: De-emphasis of seen & […]

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Netscape 1997-2002

software, webstuff / By

Scott Andrew has made a nice little “tribute” to Netscape Netscape 4.0 – 1997 – 2002 Lets put Netscape 4.0 to rest. I agree with Scott when he says: Netscape 4.0 is five years old today. That’s like 236 in Web years. Ancient. The Methuselah of browsers, kept alive on an IV drip of tag soup. BTW: The link at the top is NOT to his weblog posting, but to a very nice and artsy way of getting the point across that Netscape 4.0 now is ancient.

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Flash-based CSS2 parser

flash / By

A beta of a CSS2 parser built in Flash MX has been made available by Claus Wahlers, the creator of the jpeg2swf converter. According to David Emberton at ActionScript.com this parser will become part of a fully standards compliant XHTML display engine. The engine will support XHTML, XForms and XPath. An early prototype has been made available. Sounds like an ambitious project. Would be interesting to see a full out XHTML browser in Flash MX. But I am skeptical, parsing is CPU-intensive work, and I would be surprised if the

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Flash Cross-site scripting attack

flash, security / By

Eyes on security has released a warning about Cross-site scripting attacks made possible on sites that allow uploadable files – Bypassing JavaScript Filters – the Flash way Basically, if you have a forum or pages where you allow users to upload files, the user will still be able to execute JavaScript through the SWF file, even if posting of JavaScript is disabled in the forum/on the pages. Allowing JavaScript execution allows malicious users to catch other users cookies from the domain the file is placed. The solution? Not allowing SWF

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SVG in Flash

flash / By

This is a cool article: Notes on Parsing SVG Path Tags and Rendering in Flash MX, Helen Triolo shows how you can render complex SVG drawings in the Flash Player using the ActionScript drawing API. In a slightly related note, John Dowdell has explanied how you can take vectors the other way – from Flash to SVG. Its really quite easy :-) [Via Mike Chambers]

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The Web Standards Project and Dreamweaver MX

software / By

Dreamweaver is a tool that has been in my toolbox since its 1.0 version. From the start Dreamweaver was a lot better than its competitors. I could easily mention a lot of HTML editors that never have gotten as close to rendering good HTML as Dreamweaver. But the tool was far from perfect. John made me aware of the work of the Dreamweaver Task Force, which is a project of The Web Standards Project (WaSP). WaSP worked together with Macromedia on the latest version of their HTML editor, Dreamweaver MX.

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Macromedia Flash Search Engine SDK

flash / By

Macromedia has released an SDK that allows search engines and developers to parse SWF files and extract text and links. The FAQ states that MM are working with a number of companies but no announcements yet. Atomz Search and Google are two of the search engines I know that already are harvesting content from SWF files. Google so far has only extracted links from SWF files, but might be tempted to add more search capabilities to their search engine. The question is how easy it is to find and structure

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Interesting rebuttal to the ADTI whitepaper

software / By

The Alexis de Tocqueville Institution (AdTI) has published its white paper entitled “Opening the Open Source Debate”. A white paper I have commented on before, especially the funding of AdTI is interesting, this to me is obviously a white paper paid for in full by Microsoft. David Skoll of Roaring Penguin Software has written a very interesting rebutal to the whitepaper, more or less taking the whole white paper apart. Microsoft might want to have their money back for this one.. Roaring Penguin comments on the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution’s

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