10 years ago a browser was born. Its name was Internet Explorer 6.
Now that we’re in 2011, in an era of modern web standards, it’s time to say goodbye.

This website is dedicated to watching Internet Explorer 6 usage drop to less than 1% worldwide, so more websites can choose to drop support for Internet Explorer 6, saving hours of work for web

Internet Explorer 6 usage around the world

As per my previous post Write Once, use everywhere? Content Vs Code, I think it’s perfect timing to get some standards defined around web browsers.

For corporates, its time to move on and this move is definitely going to give great boost on Intranet front, presenting more opportunities and opening new doors.

Extract from one of the Press release:

“Up to now, domain names had to use the 26 Latin letters in the English alphabet as well as 10 numerals and the hyphen.Technical efforts have enabled display of parts of Internet addresses in other scripts, but the two-letter suffixes had to be made up of those 37 characters.The approval for non-Latin characters applies for now only to domain names connected with the two-letter country codes, like .ru for Russia and .cn for China.Languages that could become available in 2010 for Internet-site names include Arabic, Mandarin Chinese, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Hindi and Korean.he so-called generic top-level-domain suffixes, like .com, .net and .gov, will remain Latin-characters-only for now.”

Tha above announcement could bring in number of changes in current industry. Here are few of them:

• Web Content Managment: With new non-latin domains getting registered everyday, WCM demand will increase than ever before with the focus on multilingual support. In my experience with WCM, I have not come across many implementations that support multilingual. So, its going to be a challenge for both the product vedors as well as System Integrators. It is important to test the current implementations for non-latin languages and becoming a Must Have feature for any implementations going forward. The same will hold good for e-commerce .
• Translators: The market for translators will increase and will become more prominent. The content will start becoming more localized to regions and translators will come to rescue to retrieve any such localized information to outside world. And there is a good chance that translators becoming one of the offerings of WCM products.
• Search: Local/regional seach will start occupying the search space. This might lead to emergence of lot of localized search engines and will provide stiff challenge to some of the bigger players today in the industry
• Social Networking: With Web 2.0 and social networking the key in todays world, I can imagine local facebook, twitter etc. versions emerging in the market. Localized social search is other area to watch out.
• Migration tools: Emergence of tools which could help to migrate your existing site to localized version

The announcement will:

• Bring in new business opportunities and whole new dimension for non-latin countries
• Internet users will increase exponentially
• Internet will start becoming the preferred source of communication for non-latin countries through localized email and social networking sites
• System Integrators local market in non-latin countires will increase many folds
• Add more challenge to the big brands as they will be pressured to register their current domain names in any number of non-Latin-script languages to prevent fake sites
• Another potential issue highlighted is that some characters in non-Latin scripts appear similar to those of Latin-alphabet characters. So, if we substitutea non-Latin character for the similar Latin character, it will createa unique URL — and the potential for site-spoofing

What are your thoughts about it?

The session covered from history of web to what is Next Generation web (Web 2.0) and what we should do towards it. Here is extract from his presentation:

HISTORY OF WEB

He started with his experience of Web way back when he started in 1975. From Lonely computers, which were self-absorbed applications to telephone lines (part lines to kids line) which lead to evolution of Internet and standards like HTTP and HTML.

MAINSTREAM WEB APPLICATIONS TODAY

This section of the presentation covered about how the current web applications are. Few main highlighting points are:

• Increasing support for cross browsers
• Key area of development happening around Mobile space
• Server side capabilities are growing
• Programming understanding in multi-threaded environment
• Storage capacity is effectively free, CPU nearly so
• Network infrastructure improving
• Development technologies maturity at a much slower pace and challenges are in coming up with a framework like Struts and IDEs for JS-DHTML developments
• More and more user personalization
• Standardization at different scales and complexities

NEXT GENERATION WEB DRIVERS

Craig stressed on using next generation web rather than Web 2.0 with emphasis on 4 key drivers:

Enhanced User Interfaces

The driving force is the limited usability of web applications compared to applications installed locally. Ajax and DHTML are the immediate solutions.

Lightweight Programming Models

• Strong preference towards simplicity; less code = less initial work, less update work
• Scripting languages again gaining popularity with many large application built with php, perl etc.
• Loose coupling and layer based design
• Increasing preference for quick, iterative approach (Agile model)
• Programming models  
• Ajax and DHTML (server side business logic)
• Ajax and DHTML (client side business logic ) i.e. making web applications
  available offline 
• Browser plugins (Flash/ Flex/ Java FX etc)

Web as a Platform

• Web applications to become more of a service
• Web platform providing Social network effect
• Reducing “local islands” of important data
• Users looking something bigger
• Identity
• Flexibility
• Ubiquity 

The read/write web 

• Web as a Bulletin Board

WHAT SHOULD WE DO

Craigs Top Ten Suggestion List

10 – Expose Data/Logic as services

9 – Incorporate External Content

8 – Seek QOS (Quality of Service) deals from Sources

7 – Give QOS Deals to users

6 – Adopt Agile Processes

5 – Test Driven Development

4 – Architect for Scalability

3 – Embrace Heterogeneity

2 – Reach out to Mobile Clients

1 – Enable User Provided Content

The session turned out to be good for users who do not have exposure to Web 2.0. The first 45 minutes where Craig covered History of web and existing applications was bit too extended and I was looking for more on Web 2.0. Let’s hope the other sessions lined up around Web 2.0 will be able to provide more insight.

What is the best way to achieve a balance between the two – making my site usable as well as search-able.

Here is one of the possible approach:

Step 1: To design your site without any Ajax. Javascript
Step 2: Then modify your website to include small Ajax, Java scripts components making sure that the content that gets hidden is available else where in the site which does not deploy Ajax

• A Photo gadget which is designed to share a series of photos
• GoogleGram gadget that display a new greeting message for every day of the week
• Daily Me gadget which will show what you’re currently doing, as well as quotes, what’s on your mind etc.
• Free Form gadget that as the name suggest will allow free flow of information, image text layout background colour
• YouTube Channel gadget to share good videos on YouTube
• Personalized List Gadget to basically present your list of items. It could be list of your favorite songs, a list of items to buy today etc.
• Personalized Countdown gadget is more like a reminder to any event, happening with a countdown

Apart from this, it provides option to update the Gadget and re-publish so that it gets updated at the other end.

Pretty neat way to bring people togather !!!!

But few things to watch out for:

• Updation at receiving end took a pretty long time to get refreshed with updated information
• No intimation whether the iGoogle user has added your Gadget or not
• If the Gadget creator deletes the Gadget, will it get deleted at the other end?
• A way to establish two way communication rather then just one way for now

A utility to detect duplicate content detection at the time of content publish
I do not think that there is any WCM out in the market (commercial or Open source) that provides any utility for duplicate content detection

A spell-checker to ensure that the content submitted online doesn’t have any spelling mistakes
This has become and integral part of WISIWYG editors like FCKeditor. Most of the WCMS tools adopt to such content editor tool.

Content Structure which enforce Alt attribute for Image tag, title, meta descriptions, keyword tags and templates supporting picking up those information while rendering page
A more of a design consideration and rendering aspect. Lets leave this to individual design and implementation. It might be a good idea if in future, CMS provides something out-of-the-box for such considerations

What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) editors for providing facility to content editors to add formatting to text content
Most of the WCM provides WYSIWYG editors that provides basic formatting stuff like h1, h2, b etc. OpenCMS has its own inbuilt editor.

An editor that can clean up unwanted HTML tags and make it W3C compliant
Its again part of the WYSIWYG editors.

An editor that gets integrated with your CSS of the site
Most of the text editors provide this facility. FCKEditor is one such that support CSS for better integration with website. WCM’s are adopting these editors for their content editors frontend.

A utility to help detect duplicate page titles or a mechanism to generate unique page title
I can not re-collect that there is any CMS in the market that provides such utility. At present its taken more at individual implementation level rather than a CMS providing out-of-the-box.

A utility to determine broken links at the time of content publish to avoid broken links
OpenCMS is one that does provide this functionality of validating the links and reporting the broken links. but I do not know many other which does that. Fatwire do provide this in a little different way, if at the time of rendering content, it doesn’t find the link, it removes hyperlink and render content. But I think most of the CMS products doesn’t really provide this out-of-the-box.

Looking at my list above, I feel most of the Search Engine Optimization techniques are taken care at the text editor level which have become powerful over the period of time. From CMS perspective, providing few utilities like duplicate content detection, broken links etc. will sure make them Web 2.0 compliant.

Lets start with Portals space:

ATG:
Art Technology Group – A group who created art for Internet world by providing common face to all the applications within the organization/

BroadVision:
Broad-vision = enterprise wide vision? Nicely framed but their vision is really going hey-ward

Vignette:
A decorative design or small illustration used on the title page of a book or at the beginning or end of a chapter. A decorative design for your information capturing from beginning to end, from all systems across the organization.

JBoss Portal:
Java Boss?

Liferay Portal:
Life – ray : a ray of life for all the vendors who can not afford commercial portal products.

Plone:
Anyone out there help me. I have no clue about it

ECM/DM/WCM Space:

Documentum:
Document -um means documents – used as an expression of doubt, hesitation, deliberation, interest, etc. Confused about managing your documents? Here we are at your service Very Nice !

FileNet:
Files over Net? Well makes sense based on the offerings that they have. Good job !!!

Alfresco:
Out-of-doors; in the open air. It does express its open source nature but no hint about ECM? What if tomorrow its acquired by some big ECM giant?

HummingBird:
Any bird of the family Trochilid, which include around four hundred species. Well a good way to express that it can handle any content type.

Interwoven:
To weave together, as threads, strands, branches, or roots. Nice way to express the product

Fatwire:
Thick wire? A thick wire that is bringing all the content contributors together under one system

Looking forward for comments about the existing products and for including new products in the list

Scrybe is one such online/offline calender and organizer service that provides offline web application service.

Zimbra is another open source messaging and collaborative application. This powerful web client integrates email, contacts, shared calendar, VoIP, and online document authoring into a rich browser-based interface. Recently Zimbra announced launch of Zimbra desktop with the aim to enable offline access to its online Ajax powered collaborative suite.

This looks to be the trend in the near future. More and more applications are targeting to provide virtual desktop for their web 2.0 applications with the same look and feel. The idea behind all this is to remove dependency of “online enabled”. The idea is that user should not be bothered about whether his net connection is working or not. He should more be concentrating on his job and rest the application takes care. Whenever it comes online, it should sync up with the offline content changes. I am writing this post through Google Docs and I can see that this keeps on syncing up my updates with the back-end. I see this kind of behaviour with most of the Google applications. So, is Google already way ahead of others in the same race?

Thinking aloud there might be two ways to achieve this: The Web application build this functionality within them self and provides a separate desktop install for application/ or takes care within its web application to provide continuous app browsing experience. Zimbra, for examples, provides a Zimbra desktop to install locally. If you think about it, this is not the way forward to achieve. The installation will again be pain for users. The second way is to make browsers support online/offline mode for web applications. This sounds interesting and this is what Firefox 3 is aiming to achieve. The browser itself is trying to build in the basic infrastructure to support offline/online web applications. But I can see many challenges towards achieving this. To list a few:

This leaves me with a question, are we not going to face the same problems that we listed when Ajax was born??

Another feature that impress is the multilingual support built directly into data model which help global market organisations to expand their presence at no extra cost.

Other thing that comes with CS 7 is three different interfaces for content contributors/editors.
1) Insite editor for people who manages content and page layout. This was already present with the previous versions of the Content Server. Whats new is markers and designers rearrange web pages using a simple drag-and-drop interface.
2) Dash board, a new interface with this version targeted for frequent business users. Much simpler UI with easy organization and quick access to content based on user-defined tags.
3) Advanced or the actual UI which help with Admin tasks along with defining content structure. This interface is the original one which is available though out product life name it is Futuretense or OpenMarket or divine or Fatwire.

Need to wait and see how it impact WCMS world?

Apoorv’s thought about Content Server 7