Where on the Web Is HTML5?

HTML5 does way more than video: Vimeo's Flash-free player showing a clip by Maxime Bruneel.

Unless you’ve been off snorkeling in the Alps, you’ve probably heard all the recent hubbub about HTML5 and its ability to replace Flash as the web’s default video player.

But HTML5 is much more than a hopeful successor to Flash’s web-video crown. In fact, watching a video without a plug-in only scratches the surface of what HTML5 offers.

HTML5 is the next generation of HTML, the language of the web. More than just a markup syntax like its predecessors, HTML5 provides a new set of features designed to make modern web applications work more like desktop applications.

The key features in the HTML5 stack: native video and audio playback, animated graphics, geolocation, hardware acceleration for in-browser events, the ability to keep using a browser-based app even if your internet connection drops, the ability to store application data on your local machine, dragging and dropping of files from the desktop to the browser, and the addition of semantic markup on pages, making them easier for both machines and humans to understand.

Each of the major browsers supports different pieces of HTML5 right now, and we expect to see all browsers on the same page in a year or two. You might think, given variances in browser support, that no one is using the future of the web. But you’d be wrong. HTML5 is everywhere you turn. In fact, some of our favorite web apps are making heavy use of HTML5 — to paraphrase William Gibson, the future of the web is already here, it just isn’t evenly distributed yet.

Did you know that Google’s homepage, one of the most trafficked pages on the web, uses HTML5? Technically, the Google homepage just uses the HTML5 doctype — the rest of the page is actually quite archaic (and invalid) code — but other Google apps take advantage of HTML5 much more.

Gmail, one of the bigger webmail apps on the web, uses HTML5’s offline storage mechanism to allow you to work with your e-mail even when you don’t have an internet connection. Google Docs also uses the HTML5 offline tools, as do the online office suite Zoho and the WordPress blogging system. Check out Mark
Pilgrim’s excellent rundown on how to add offline support to your apps if you want to start using this feature).

Scribd's new document reader: all web standards, no Flash.

Aside from video, HTML5 is replacing Flash in other ways. Document sharing site Scribd recently made a splash by announcing it will be switching its document viewer from Flash to HTML5 and web standards. Scribd is a great example of what is possible when combining HTML5 elements (primarily the Canvas element, which powers animations) with attendant tools like cascading stylesheets. Scribd makes especially nice use of the @font-face element to load fancy fonts, and it uses the new CSS 3 standard to power some animated transitions between pages.

The combination of tools allows Scribd to convert PDF files into pure HTML documents while maintaining the structural layout, fonts, embedded images and layered elements of the original.

Most impressive about Scribd’s new HTML5 features? They even work in IE6. Check out this example, which manages to render even complex mathematical equations in pure HTML.

They came from space, and the W3C spec: Canvas Invaders

While Scribd might have the best implementation of the canvas element we’ve seen, there are plenty of other very cool examples already on the web. The site Canvas Demos has collection of experiments with canvas, showcasing everything from online games to apps like Rainbow, a browser extension that can pull any color out of a website.

Probably the best-known examples of HTML5 on the web are the current video experiments by YouTube and Vimeo. In both cases, the HTML5 versions of the sites are still opt-in, and there’s no code to embed the HTML5 version of a video on your own site, but it’s a start.

Another aspect of HTML5 that browsers are beginning to support is a set of geolocation tools. Technically, the geolocation API is not part of the HTML5 spec, but it is governed by the W3C and will arrive alongside HTML5 the markup spec. Using the geolocation API, a web app running in the browser can obtain your whereabouts, making location-based web searches more relevant.

Click on the little circle above the yellow guy to tell Google Maps where you are.

Google Maps uses it. The site’s interface now offers a small circle icon just below the navigation wheel — click it and maps will zoom to your current location.

At the moment, the geolocation API isn’t widely supported by desktop browsers (only Chrome and Firefox 3.6+), but Google makes a plug-in called Gears which offers a fallback solution for older browsers.

That’s the tactic Twitter uses for its geo-aware tweets, tapping into the geolocation API when it’s available and falling back to Gears when it’s not.

In the end, one of the most powerful changes in HTML5 may not be as flashy as any of the examples listed above. HTML5’s biggest contribution to the web may well end up being its new structural tags, like <header>, <footer>, <section> and <article>.

These new tags allow web authors to better define their content, which means search engines will need to do a lot less guessing when they index the web. That will mean better, more relevant results and faster links to the information you want.

There are countless sites already using HTML5’s new tags, though you’d never know it without viewing the source of the pages. If you’d like to see some examples, head over to HTML5Gallery, which features hundreds of sites using varying degrees of HTML5.

To use the new structural tags on your own site, check out our tutorial on Building Web Pages With HTML 5. And there’s no need to worry; with a little JavaScript helper, these tags will work in any browser.

HTML5 can also be extended to offer even more semantic structure through Microdata. Using standardized data formats (similar in many ways to microformats) websites can offer not only data, but definitions of what that data is.

Ultimately, microdata exists for the benefit of web browsers and search engines. Eventually, search engines could use microdata to find your friends on the web and browsers could use it to connect you with those friends no matter what flavor-of-the-month social site they might be using. To experiment with these extensions, head over to Google’s Rich Snippets Testing Tool.

While there’s no question that HTML5 is still in the experimental stage, it’s already gaining traction, and it’s doing a whole lot more than just playing video on your mobile phone.

By Scott Gilbertson
Newscribe : get free news in real time

  See Also:

• Embed Videos in Your Web Pages Using HTML5
• Building Web Pages With HTML5
• Add Semantic Value to Your Pages With HTML5
• Who Needs Flash?

Gates Foundation to fund 78 more health projects

The fourth round of grants will fund research projects in 18 countries.

 (Credit: Grand Challenges Explorations)

In its fourth round of funding, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's Grand Challenges Explorations grants have been awarded to 78 science projects, with each collecting $100,000.

Through its grants, the five-year, $100 million initiative aims to foster "creative projects that show great promise to improve the health of people in the developing world," and as part of the Grand Challenges in Global Health initiative is supported by the Gates Foundation.

This latest round of grants brings the total number of Exploration projects receiving funding to 340. Although the group originally anticipated funding roughly 60 projects per round, it is averaging closer to 80.

The foundation reports that the winners come from universities, research institutes, and nonprofits, with research spread across 18 countries on six continents.

The wide range of projects includes a "seek-and-destroy" laser vaccine, cell phone microscopes to diagnose malaria, ultrasound as a reversible male contraceptive, and disposable paper-based diagnostics devices. All project topics from the four rounds are listed here.

"We are convinced that some of these ideas will lead to new innovations and eventually solutions that will save lives," says Dr. Tachi Yamada, president of the Gates Foundation's Global Health Program, in a statement.

The group says round 5 is open for submissions until May 19, and round 6 will open in September. 
Throughout the initiative, "priority areas of focus" include: enteric and diarrheal diseases, HIV/AIDS, malaria, pneumonia, tuberculosis, and neglected and other infectious diseases. Other areas center on integrated health solutions for: family planning; nutrition; maternal, neonatal, and child health; tobacco control; and vaccine-preventable diseases.

Elizabeth Armstrong Moore is a freelance journalist based in Portland, Ore. She has contributed to Wired magazine, The Christian Science Monitor, and public radio. Her semi-obscure hobbies include unicycling, slacklining, hula-hooping, scuba diving, billiards, Sudoku, Magic the Gathering, and classical piano. She is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. 

 

 Source: Newscribe : get free news in real time

 

The Bailout Era

The Bailout Age?

The printing press already has its own prominent place in history, so we’re not sure what else to call the first couple decades of the new millennium, but after Monday's news, there’s little debate: time to fire it up!

The European Union and International Monetary Fund announced a plan that comes straight out of the United States’ playbook: smother debt flare-ups with truckloads of “free money” while the central bank manipulates rates.

European leaders unveiled a $957 billion plan to save themselves and their currency. Here’s the quick and dirty:

• The EU will pony up $560 billion in new loans and $76 billion in existing deals for the GIIPS nations (as we’ve taken to calling them...no reason to give pigs such a bad rap)

• The IMF says it's ready with $321 billion

• The European Central Bank (ECB) has abandoned its old stance (and credibility) by launching a program to purchase government and corporate debt.

“This is like pouring Chanel No. 5 on a French ‘lady of the evening,’” Rob Parenteau, editor of The Richebacher Letter, wrote us early this morning, “after a night of wanton debauchery. More public debt will be issued as public debt guarantees and other fiscal assistance are put into place. German bunds are now the most screaming short."

But Parenteau warns that a quick move is not necessarily a smart one. "I would not put on shorts on the euro or euro banks or buy a credit default swap (CDS) on banks until this rally flares out, which I expect by June, if not sooner. By then, you will have an even more advantageous point to pick at the carcass of the fatally flawed by design -- as many argued over a decade ago -- euro zone.”

What of the implications for investors who have been taken on a wild ride of late. "This weekend's actions heavily reinforce the three-to-five year investing case for gold, because there's little reason for investors to view the euro as a relatively ‘hard’ currency," Parenteau argues. "This weekend's actions also weakened the ‘safe haven’ status of German bunds; expect bund yields to keep rising if German politicians approve funding for the off-balance sheet strategic investment vehicle (SIV) contraption that was set up to evade the ‘no bailout’ clause of the euro treaty.”

“The short covering rally should be fierce, but quick,” Parenteau advises, “given the tremendous oversold/overly pessimistic position markets were in going into this weekend. Savvy, cynical professional investors are welcome to go long risky assets like EPP or IBB (a Pacific ex-Japan ETF and biotech ETF, respectively) for the ride, but you must be ready to rip these positions out within a week or two.”

Addison Wiggin 

The Bailout Era originally appeared in the Daily Reckoning, which offers a uniquely refreshing perspective on the global economy, investing, gold, stocks and today's markets. Check out our new special report Investing in Offshore Oil

Addison Wiggin is the executive publisher of Agora Financial, LLC, a fiercely independent economic forecasting and financial research firm. The executive producer of the acclaimed documentary film I.O.U.S.A. and 3 time New York Times best-selling authort, Addison is also the editorial director of Agora Financial’s daily 5 Min. Forecast and The Daily Reckoning. 

The Renaissance. The Age of Enlightenment. The Industrial Revolution. The Gilded Age. The Cold War. The Information Age.

Newscribe : get free news in real time

May 11, 1951: RAM Is Born

1951: Jay Forrester files a patent application for the matrix core memory.

Back when computers still weighed hundreds of pounds and were primarily used by the military, computer memory relied on cathode rays to retrieve information. But the Navy needed a faster computer that could run flight simulations in real time.

In stepped a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Led by professor Jay Forrester, the researchers developed a three-dimensional magnetic structure code-named Project Whirlwind.

The structure consisted of a plane made of wires and magnetic rings called cores. Each ring contained one bit of data. Every bit on the memory plane could be accessed with a single read-and-write cycle.

In short, magnetic core memory was the first random access memory that was practical, reliable and relatively high-speed. The time it took to request and retrieve information from memory was a microsecond — hundreds of thousands of times slower than memory today, but nonetheless a magnificent achievement in the 1950s.

“When we were working on this, in a million years we couldn’t imagine what would happen with memory,” said Bernard Widrow, who worked on Project Whirlwind with Forrester, in a 2009 interview with Edison Tech Center.

Forrester applied for a patent on his invention May 11, 1951. Project Whirlwind stayed active until 1959, though the technology was never used for a flight simulator.

Source: Today in Technology History; Edison Tech Center 
Newscribe : get free news in real time

Photo: Magnetic core memory removed from an Olympia 15-digit Nixie calculator.
Synx508/Flickr
See Also:

• March 8, 1955: The Mother of All Operating Systems
• Feb. 1, 1951: TV Shows Atomic Blast, Live
• Feb. 4, 1951: Major Assist Removes Enormous Cyst
• April 5, 1951: Happy Birthday, Mr. Pied Piper of Technology
• May 1951: Lockheed, Convair Get Contracts to Build VTOL
• May 8, 1951: DuPont Debuts Dacron
• Oct. 31, 1951: We’ll Cross That Street When We Come to It
• Dec. 5, 1951: ‘Your Car Is on the 12th Floor, Lady’
• May 11, 868: Signed, Sealed, Delivered
• May 11, 1997: Machine Bests Man in Tournament-Level Chess Match

How did bad tax policy contribute to the financial meltdown?

Tax policy and the global financial crisis

 

IT has been widely held that one of the immediate causes of the 2008/2009 US financial crisis is the subprime housing loans there, which via various ingenious financial instruments had at some point in time seriously put at risk the whole global financial system.

Policymakers, meanwhile, are engaged in a debate as to how new regulations could be introduced into financial systems to curb the assumption of excessive risk-taking and, at the same time, look into how banks and financial institutions be subjected to new capitalisation rules going forward.

One area that has not been widely looked at is the role of tax policy in the crisis.

The immediate response by many countries was to cut corporate tax rates as a short term measure to cope with the sharp economic contraction.

But how did bad tax policy contribute to the crisis?

It was only recently that the Internatianal Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) produced two reports in response to the questions: “What aspects of the tax system has helped cause or exacerbate the crisis, and whether tax policy needs to be reevaluated” in light of what has happened.

The reports looked at the US income tax system and lessons can be learnt from them since our own system can adopt some of these policy initiatives.

Preference for debt vs equity financing 

This is seen as an obvious link to the crisis.
When a company wishes to finance its business, should it look to borrowings (debt) or should it finance through capital (equity)?

Most tax systems, including Malaysia’s system, favours debt financing over equity financing because of the deductibility of interest payments and the non-deductibility of the cost of equity capital.

Thus, this obvious bias for debt financing is recognised particularly at the corporate level.
With the surge in corporate borrowings in the last decade or so, including leveraged buyouts and the intense activities of private equity funds, the possibility that this bias may have contributed to the risks in the system is a serious consideration.

There is little doubt that under such a bias system, corporate finance will always respond positively to tax considerations.

This tax preference for debt has been long-standing and widely recognised by tax practitioners, something which could make an otherwise non-profitable investment profitable.

The position in Malaysia so far seems to reflect the common bias towards debt financing although the introduction of thin capitalisation rules, which are being awaited, could change that scenario.

The US housing bubble

The bubble is generally understood to have been the effect of increased household borrowings and high house prices.

The tax rule in the United States allows mortgage interest taken out on a home to be fully deductible against income from employment earnings.

Thus with the expectation of increases in home prices, this has raised the expected returns on borrowings to purchase houses.

Analysts believe that this could be a contributing factor but are unable to point to empirical evidence, given the range and complexity of the various instruments that were in place when the bubble burst.

Tax planning and lack of transparency

The need to give further study to this possible link is recognised - that the development of complex financial instruments could in part be spurred by the tax avoidance opportunity that could arise.

Thus, swaps have been used to avoid withholding tax.

The use of offshore low tax jurisdictions to hold funds has helped create an opaque environment.
The G20 initiatives last year in curbing such practice have seen countries with low tax jurisdictions responding to a global initiative to conclude agreements for the exchange of information.

Malaysia is a signatory to such agreements.

Restriction in the transfer of tax losses 

This refers to where losses are not available for carry-forward in the case of a change in ownership.
Economists see this rule as lacking neutrality as they have always argued that tax losses should be refunded or at least be allowed to be carried forward.

The further argument is that such restriction acts as an impediment to efficient acquisitions. The similar restrictive rule in Malaysia, although introduced in law, has been modified in its operation.
This is particularly helpful.

The widely held practice under a VAT (value added tax)/GST(goods and services tax) regime to exempt financial services is seen as a bias towards households using financial services.

What it means is that it encourages consumers to borrow rather than save until they are able to pay for fully-taxed products.

Malaysia’s GST tax rules, which have yet to be enacted, appear to have adopted the same exemption although details as to how these would operate are not yet known.

Conclusion 

The adoption of the New Economic Model (NEM) is perhaps an opportune time to look at our tax policies. New policy approaches should be in sync with the NEM. For example the implementation of the GST, if accompanied by a marked reduction in the corporate income tax rate, should get rid of the bias towards debt. The loss of tax revenue could be made up by higher GST collections from an increase in per capita income, a key aim of the model.

Kang Beng Hoe is executive director of TAXAND MALAYSIA Sdn Bhd, a member firm of the TAXAND Network of independent tax firms worldwide. The views expressed do not necessarily represent those of the firm. Readers should seek specific professional advice before acting on the views.