Archive for the ‘ Web ’ Category
Earlier today, I found an interesting read on the TrendMicro blog, on what might be the greatest and most resilient Web 2.0 malware known to date – Koobface. 
They even have a well-documented pdf about Koobface to go with the blog article.
Enjoy the lecture! 
It’s out.
And Paul Thurrott has a nice review for it. Check it out: parts 1, 2, 3 and 4.
“In a world where the Web is the platform, having ten core Web fonts makes no sense.” – Jon Tan, jontangerine.com
Safari and Internet Explorer already support it, while Firefox and Opera will get it soon: downloadable webfonts!
Well, actually, Internet Explorer only has support for Embedded OpenType (EOT), while Safari 3.1 for Windows and Mac now fully supports the embedding of “sfnt fonts” (TrueType, OpenType PS, OpenType TT) using the @font-face declaration. As far as Firefox and Opera go, support for @font-face is scheduled for Firefox 3.1 to be released later this year. Opera had already a build with @font-face support, but it didn’t make it in the final release of 9.5. So it’s very likely to be in Opera 10. Now millions of web users will be able to view websites the way they were intended to be.
Technically the fonts are not embedded in the website, but they are simply linked like an image file. Thus the fonts need to be stored on a public server. Since you cannot upload commercial fonts to a public webserver, you are limited to freeware fonts. The embedding is done via CSS, following the W3C standard:
@font-face {
font-family: "GraublauWeb";
src: url(../fonts/GraublauWeb-Regular) format("truetype");
}
@font-face {
font-family: "GraublauWeb";
font-weight: bold;
src: url(../fonts/GraublauWeb-Bold) format("truetype");
}Although font embedding is an awesome thing, there’s still a big (legal) problem. This quote from John Gruber sent to Typographica sums up the current dilemma: “The fonts you’re allowed to embed legally aren’t worth using; the fonts that are worth using aren’t embeddable.”
He is right, but this doesn’t always have to be the case. FDI fonts.info releases a set of high-quality web fonts supporting a wide range of character encodings. Graublau Sans Web regular and bold were designed by Georg Seifert. The fonts are optimized for screen use and support a wide range of character encodings, for example ISO 8859-15 (Western), ISO 8859-2 (Central European), ISO 8859-3 (Turkish, Maltese and Esperanto), ISO 8859-4 (Baltic), ISO 8859-5 (Cyrillic), ISO 8859-7 (Greek) and ISO 8859-10 (Scandinavian). Both fonts may be embedded in any website free of charge.
Here’s a demo page – make sure you use Safari 3.1! You can also visit this Webfonts.info Wiki page to find the download links some other fonts, and another demo to go with it. Don’t forget to check the license restrictions before using any of them.
UPDATE: Google Chrome is out!
Google Chrome is an open source browser based on Webkit and powered by Google Gears. It was accidentally announced prematurely on September 1, 2008 and a beta will apparently be released today, in 100 countries. It premiers originally on Windows only, with Mac and Linux versions to come later.
Features include:
There’s also a very cool comic describing the features in Google Chrome.
From the Official Google blog:
Google has been developing a new algorithm for indexing textual content in Flash files of all kinds, from Flash menus, buttons and banners, to self-contained Flash websites. Recently, we’ve improved the performance of this Flash indexing algorithm by integrating Adobe’s Flash Player technology.
In the past, web designers faced challenges if they chose to develop a site in Flash because the content they included was not indexable by search engines. They needed to make extra effort to ensure that their content was also presented in another way that search engines could find.
Now that we’ve launched our Flash indexing algorithm, web designers can expect improved visibility of their published Flash content, and you can expect to see better search results and snippets. There’s more info on the Webmaster Central blog about the Searchable SWF integration.
Finally!
Taken from WebProNews:
Here’s a head-scratcher with a deceptively obvious answer: When a person comments on a blog or website, who owns, or owns the rights to, that comment? Is it the commenter or the blog/website publisher? It’s a trickier question than you might think.
The intuitive answer, an opinion shared by some prominent bloggers, is that once a commenter comments, they submit the comment with the knowledge they’ve lost control of that comment forever. Of course, there’s more than one way to look at it, but there is also more than one platform (or publishing model) to consider, and at least a couple of legal aspects to explore.
A newspaper or magazine editor, for example, elects to publish response letters from readers. Not all responses are published, and thanks to some legal language, letter-writers are often informed they lose, to some extent, ownership of those letters.
In a sense, blog comments are similar. A blogger can elect not to publish a comment at all, or she can edit or delete a comment for various reasons. But there are stark differences, too. Most of the time, there is no written agreement about comments as there is with submitted letters. Another difference: Once a print publication publishes, the content can’t be unpublished. Along some (strong) lines of logic, though this hasn’t been fully tested in the legal system, this sense of permanency subjects print publishers to greater liability than digital publishers.
That, and the Communications Decency Act (so far) has protected bloggers from being liable for third party comments. Though they’ve tried, lawyers have had a tough time in court going after bloggers for something a commenter said. They have had more success in going after the commenter, if they can force identifying information from the blog host. This commenter liability would suggest a definite ownership of comments.
However, it could be argued also that a commenter no more owns his comment than a person quoted in an article “owns” his quote. (Quotation ownership, though, is perhaps a different animal altogether, and one that walks lines of ethicsor even attribution etiquettemore than legal ones.)
More, in the original article. Quite an interesting issue, nonetheless.
Today marks the release of the 3rd version of the popular Firefox browser, with a lot of new features. There’s also a special download page for this event, as they try to reach a world record for most downloads in 24 hours.
WP Cumulus Flash tag cloud by Roy Tanck and Luke Morton requires Flash Player 9 or better.
