#hypermedia and scripting

[lodiwayoflearning]

The Transition Language

By Felipe Lodi

Exiting technologies we use and love will die someday. In the Web and technology in general everything that is new, will be used for a certain amount of time and one day will die or at least live just for a few. Many technologies are attempts of patterns creation and when they are not able to “be” a standard, they start to become discredited until the day something newer and better overlaps what once was great and amazing.

This is what is happening with devices such as laptops and desktop computers being replaced in a daily basis by incredible mobility advents. This is what is happening with technologies such as Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight being replaced by simpler technologies and standards like HTML5 and JavaScript.

One of the reasons they may actually die is on the dependency on software that needs to be on the client side that despite the fact they may be there already when you buy your new computer or system, they will eventually crash and/or require you to update its client side piece of software, which is not productive or intuitive.

Another reason is on the technologies that are obscurely linked together. Isn’t that curious that the lack of popularity on some hardware devices nowadays happens on the same time as some applications are also becoming less popular? Flash and Silverlight were developed to a Web that depended on devices with better local processing and larger storage than the mobiles.

New trends still consider processing on the client side but in a lighter way. There will be no dependency on third party software for Browser oriented applications regardless of the type of device you are using. I also wonder about the future of the Java Platform we also need to download and keep updated in order to run plenty of software on the Browser. With the new trend in using HTML5, business applications, games, mobile applications or just ordinary web sites will gain in productivity, mobility, security, scalability and since a there will be no dependency on client side technologies, simplicity.

For developers, HTML5 brings the latest revision of the HTML markup language, the latest revision of CSS (the third version) and several JavaScript APIs that combined, enable the developer to create applications as rich as the desktop applications. (HTML5Rocks, 2012) Developers also ever wanted to target their applications to several platforms at the same time and HTML5 provides that. It eases the task of developing for a determined type of device and facilitates the deployment for as many users as you have and sometimes they will not even notice that the application has been fixed or upgraded.

HTML5 provides local file access such perk not presented on previous versions because of all maliciously on the Web. Because of those bad guys we paid for long but now, we are able to safely access the user’s file system and for instance build applications that validate the content of files before uploading them to the Web.

Presentation is everything on the new version of HTML. I have seen lately the nicest Web sites built up in HTML5 and intuitively I right click on the content to find out that the amazing “look and feel” I am experiencing is not Flash nor Silverlight. Fonts can be accessed on local systems and this enriches the presentation. Rounded corners, shadowing, gradients and 3D cool stuff are now available minimizing even further the dependency on third party proprietary software. For HTML5 clicking is a technology of the past century. Meaning that other ways of user’s interactivity embraces multi-touch, device orientation and geo location.

In a world where the mobility and communication are becoming essential for us to work, play and entertain, new devices are emerging and some technologies are dying. (Mims, 2011) To accommodate all this transition in the software level, a new vanguard language compatible with all this evolution needed to be unveiled. Perhaps one day we will be using just one programming language instead of mastering a few to deploy to the Web but one thing it is true: HTML5 is the transition language now.

REFERENCES LIST

HTML5Rocks, 2012. WHY HTML5 ROCKS. [Online] Available at: http://www.html5rocks.com/en/why [Accessed 14 July 2012].

Mims, C., 2011. HTML5 Triumphant: Silverlight, Flash Discontinuing. [Online] Available at: http://www.technologyreview.com/view/426083/html5-triumphant-silverlight-flash-discontinuing/ [Accessed 14 July 2012].

[lodiwayoflearning]

Degrees of Separation

By Felipe Lodi

The Cereal box shows several ingredient names in Dutch that I have no clue about them. For an instant, I wished to have a way to touch with my finger on them to see their meaning and translation. I wished that for many things we have seen around us, everywhere. So what if the Web was even further interconnected and every piece of information in a page could be linked to a description?

The description per se would contain other words where some would be meaningless and these words would be again clickable targeting further descriptions and so. Like a Neural Network working pretty much like our minds. Apart of the whole complexity this subject brings, we remember things based on things we are thinking and seeing at the moment. Then we remember people related to the thoughts we are having and this would happen for a while.

The Web already work similar to this if we do the exercise of starting clicking on links in a page and eventually these links will bring different Web sites, different links and you just go keeping going deeper and deeper into the Web. Somehow, we could say that all Websites (on the Web and not in local networks) are connected.

And there is this theory of six degrees of separation that states that everyone is away of everyone in the planet at a maximum of six people. It is like Dalai Lama is only at the maximum of six people away from you, from me and everyone else. (Smith, 2009) It is quite feasible therefore that this happens also for all Web sites in the World.

However if we imagine a Web site where all the written words are links? Despite the layout confusion this might cause, this could represent a window to several other Web sites with not much effort. Imagining then that the destination Web sites also used this practice, in a matter of few degrees of navigation, much of the human’s knowledge published as Web content could be reached.

The practice is valid to me but not as links as we know them. There are different ways to link content. As user, I use Browser capabilities to translate and define content as I highlight the unknown term in a page. I also have options to show me on the map another highlighted address without having to click on that. At the click of the mouse, I much like to search on Google from within the page and the selected term.

The content is all there and there is no need for polluted Web pages full of links to everywhere. Perhaps by doing this practice however, we would be able to know the degree of separation of all pages of the Web. Redundancies would become clearer, wrong definitions and misunderstood concepts would be evident and people would be even more connected.

REFERENCES LIST

Smith, D., 2009. Proof! Just six degrees of separation between us. [Online] Available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/aug/03/internet.email [Accessed 14 July 2012].