IBM has a nice summary article explaining some of the changes that will be coming when HTML 5 is finally released. HTML 5 (also know as “Web Applications 1.0″) will add new tags for page structure, block and inline elements, embedded media and interactivity, while still maintaining decent backwards compatibility for HTML-4 browsers.

Full technical specs for HTML 5 can be found on the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group website.

This year Eric Meyer, Jeffrey Zeldman and the crew at A List Apart have been putting on series of web standards conferences called An Event Apart. They’ve held events in Boston and Seattle already. Chicago will be later this month and, at least right now, tickets are still available.

This week they announced a fourth event: An Event Apart San Francisco will be held October 4–5 at The Palace Hotel. Tickets will be $795 through September 7 and $895 after that. Their events have been selling out, so if you want to go don’t wait too long.

(Full disclosure: they are clients of mine too.)

The Atom Publishing Protocol is now a real web standard (RFC 4287).

APP is different from, but closely related to, the Atom Syndication Format which is an XML format used for web feeds and an alternative to RSS feeds. The Atom Publishing Protocol goes a step further than syndication and uses XML-formated requests over HTTP to manipulate Web resources. In other words, it’s not just for reading, it allows for creating, reading, updating and deleting (CRUD) resources over the web.

Those of you following the development of Ruby on Rails will recognize APP as being an example of a RESTful protocol. (The REST model is one of the new features of Rails.)

With it’s ability to edit data and support for arbitrary media resources, Atom becomes useful for web feeds, wikis, calendars, photo libraries, podcasts, video distribution, document management… even software distribution. You can publish anything to the world and the world can interact with it!

The days of complicated web services like SOAP and WSDL are behind us. Atom and REST are on the rise and I’m interested to see what developers do with them. For example, there’s been a lot of discussion recently about opening up closed social networks like Facebook (here, here, here and here). Atom/REST could allow a simple way to share information between social networks. An update to your profile or friend list on one social network could ripple out to all of your others using Atom.

A good place to start learning more about Atom is Atom Enabled.

There are at least four notable groups that you can’t get on iTunes: The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Radiohead and AC/DC.

This week it was announced that Led Zeppelin will be coming to iTunes! It won’t affect me much—I’ve already ripped every song from CD—but I’m happy they will be available to everyone else. Granted, they are only releasing a 24-track greatest hits album called “Mothership” and it won’t be released until November 12, but you gotta figure that the remaining 57 songs will follow soon. (By my quick count there were originally nine albums with 81 songs.)

This week also brought news from AC/DC… They plan to release their entire 18-album catalog exclusively on Verizon’s VCast music service. That’s sucky because you have to be a Verizon customer to buy them. It’s double-sucky that you can only purchase them as full albums, not single songs. It’s triple-sucky that you can’t even buy them from your phone directly; you have to download them from Verizon’s website and then upload them to your phone. The rumor is that AC/DC’s insistance on full-album-only sales is what kept them off of iTunes.

No word on The Beatles or Radiohead yet…

New and Notable This Week

• Jose Gonzalez: Stay in the Shade
  Every bit as wonderful as his previous album but his voice is a little less wispy this time around.
• Guru: Jazzmatazz, Vol. 4
  Guru’s long-awaited fourth installment of old school hip-hop mixed with Jazz. This album continues the trend, ever since the first volume in 1993, of drifting away from jazz/hip-hop and towards jazz/R&B. Personally, I like the older volumes much better.
• Trey Anastasio: The Horseshoe Curve
  The former Phish frontman has put out a solo jazz-funk album. No doubt the performers are all top-notch, but quite honestly it has the appeal of a Phish album without the quirky lyrics.

Free Download

• Tegan and Sara: “Back in Your Head”
  I think you should buy the whole album instead, but maybe this track will help convince you.

A sample of the font Georgia

Apple and Microsoft have renewed their font licensing agreement. The agreement gives Apple users continued use of Microsoft’s core fonts which include Andale Mono, Arial, Comic Sans MS, Courier New, Georgia, Impact, Times New Roman, Trebuchet MS, Verdana, and Webdings.

Here’s the backstory. Back around 1991, Microsoft licensed TrueType font technology from Apple. (There was a “font format war” going on between Adobe PostScript and Apple TrueType at the time.) Microsoft worked with Monotype to develop several TrueType versions of classic fonts—Arial (based on Helvetica), Courier New, Times New Roman—for release with Windows 3.1. These were “fine tuned” for screen legibility but they were also an example of Microsoft’s “embrace and extend” policy—they couldn’t own the original fonts but they owned their new versions.

In 1996, Microsoft started an initiative dubbed “Core fonts for the Web” whose idea was to create a standard pack of fonts that would be present on all computers so that web pages would have a consistent appearance from one computer to the next. Along with this initiative, they developed more fonts. They hired Matthew Carter to design Georgia and Verdana and designed Trebuchet MS, Comic Sans MS and Webdings in-house. They also licensed Impact, a font released by font-house Stephenson Blake in 1965. In 1998 they added Monotype.com which was later renamed Andale Mono. From 1996 to 2002, these core fonts were available for free download.

The license agreement for the core font package said that one could freely download, use and distribute the fonts but could not bundle them with commercial software. Software companies like Apple needed a license from Microsoft to include them. So Apple licensed Microsoft’s fonts to include with every Mac.

As a result, over the last ten years, these fonts have become considered “web safe” fonts because most computers have them pre-installed. That’s been great for web designers because they can design using one of those fonts or at least use them as a backup font if another preferred font isn’t installed. We’ve all come to take them for granted.

Luckily Microsoft and Apple struck a new license agreement and we won’t have to worry. No word on the terms or how long the new license lasts. I’d guess ten years, but that’s just a guess.

Bet you didn’t even know you were in danger of losing them, did you? Imagine being limited to designing web pages using only Helvetica, Times and Courier… ew.

I stumbled upon an odd Ruby on Rails bug this week. It was difficult to track down because it was a bug that only affected some users some of the time. Out of every 100 users: 50 would have no problems, 42 would have problems 2% of the time, 8 would have problems 8% of the time. Making it more difficult to pinpoint—during 92% of the year none of the users experienced any problems at all! Let me demonstrate the problem and explain how to solve it.

Let’s say we have a form for a user to fill out. On that form, we want the user to provide a date, but we don’t care about the day of the month; we just want the month and year. We might be asking for their birth month and year or how long they’ve been using our product. The most common example would be asking for a credit card expiration date.

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