Tech Goes Boom

Tiger Effects

One of the most popular aspects of Tiger's WWDC release has been the talk of Dashboard and Safari 2.0. As a result of this, Dave Hyatt has been pulled from his deep blogging hibernation back into the world of passionate web design debate. It was previously assumed that Dave had been chained in a dungeon in Cupertino and made to code like a 3 year old singapore child, leaving no time to eat, let alone blog.

With Safari 2.0 and Dashboard, Apple are proposing new extensions to HTML in order to accommodate new functionality. This has put a great deal of knickers in a twist. With cries of indignation and fear, we are reminded loudly of the earlier iterations of the browser wars, with both Netscape and Microsoft releasing proprietary tags to extend the functionality of their browsers, which of course worked only in their browsers. Dave has popped back onto radar to defend this action, and does an admirable job.

In what some see as a wagging of dangly bits at the W3C and IETF, Dave along with other browser manufacturers has formed the WHAT-WG to develop these new extensions. When they are mature enough, the WHAT-WG will submit them to the W3C or the IETF. Given the glacial speed with which these standards bodies work, it's not surprising that the WHAT-WG would like to have all of this working before submitting it for standardization.

It's really good to see Dave blogging again.