I was helping another Web developer track down a display problem on a recent project. I pulled up the HTML source for the page, and he was amazed that I knew how to work with the source code.

It made me wonder: How much does a Web developer need to know about HTML? I came to the realization that I cannot accept a so-called Web developer who doesn't fully understand the technology used to create his applications.

Behind the scenes
I show my age when I say that I was around in the beginning coding pages by hand, using a vi editor on the UNIX server hosting the site. I built many sites with standard HTML and Perl. These sites were very functional, but the sites don't match what is possible today.

The latest version of HTML (4.01) has been with us since 1999. While there have been advances with CSS, JavaScript, and many more related standards, HTML is at the core of the Web experience....

In a meeting Tuesday, Mozilla developers and managers nailed down details of Firefox 3.1, including the release date for the first alpha. Previously, Mozilla had tentatively scheduled the alpha for sometime this month.

"Still on track for Friday release," said the notes posted online after the morning meeting.

Mozilla froze the Firefox 3.1 code yesterday and will begin to assemble builds of the preview today, the notes continued. Only the US-English version of the browser will be tested before it's posted to Mozilla's servers.

Although the alpha is a work in progress -- numerous features Mozilla wants to ship with the final won't make it into the first preview -- several changes will debut Friday, including improvements to the location bar and enhanced Ctrl-Tab tab switching that presents thumbnails when cycling through open tabs....

In an announcement yesterday, Opera Software ASA said it launched the effort to help set the pace of Web standards education and training in secondary schools, colleges, universities and businesses.

Under the project, Opera has created an online Web Standards Curriculum, which provides detailed information and lessons about Web design and development using standards-based coding. The online curriculum so far includes 23 articles, with more than 30 to come, according to Thomas Ford, communications manager for the Oslo-based company.

"This is essentially a curriculum for teaching standards-based Web design," Ford said. Many existing materials on the subject are out of date or incomplete, he said, so Chris Mills, developer relations manager at Opera, created the company's own version of a training course. "We wanted something that was easy to understand. Chris saw a lack of good standards-based design materials," Ford said....

Both companies have been given optimized Adobe Flash Player technology to help them better index dynamic Web content and rich Internet applications that include the Flash file format, or Shockwave Flash, Adobe said in a statement. Search engines already index static text and links within Shockwave Flash files, but rich Internet applications and dynamic Web content are elusive to search engines because of their changing states, Adobe noted.

Adobe's technology means that millions of pre-existing RIAs that use Flash technology, including content that loads at runtime, are immediately searchable without alteration by companies or developers, Adobe said. Google has already added the optimized Flash Player to its search engine, while Yahoo plans to add the technology to a future update of Yahoo Search.

"Designers and Web developers have long been frustrated that search engines couldn't better access the information within their content created with Flash technology. It's great to see Adobe and the search engines working directly together to improve the situation," Danny Sullivan, editor in chief of SearchEngineLand.com, said in a statement. "The changes should help unlock information that's previously been 'invisible' and will likely result in a better experience for searchers."

That's where the new dojo.E extensions effort comes into play, aimed at making Dojo more declarative so that it can be more easily implemented by a wider array of developers.

Dojo.E is a small JavaScript library that a developer includes on top of Dojo, enabling them to mix in the markup language with HTML, or calling it from an external reference file.

"Dojo.E ... allows developers to access Dojo functionality and add Dojo behaviors to their applications using a declarative markup language," Nexaweb Chief Architect Bob Buffone told InternetNews.com. "Right now, if you're using Dojo, you're doing it by using a lot of JavaScript. This new XML markup really abstracts a lot of the underlying Dojo implementation and lets developers interact with a higher-order language."

The effort is spearheaded by enterprise Ajax developer Nexaweb and comes at a time when the technology is extending deeper into the mainstream of enterprise development efforts.

At the same time, Dojo has emerged as a major force in Ajax, having become one of the mostly widely used toolkits, thanks in part to the backing of major vendors including IBM, Sun and AOL, as well as Nexaweb....

Through the SearchMonkey initiative, Yahoo plans to tap into the vast stores of structured data within the Web pages its search engine indexes to deliver results that provide much more information about sites' content than the traditional list of blue links with text snippets underneath.

The announcement comes on the same day that Yahoo's future is once again called into question. Earlier today, activist investor Carl Icahn confirmed his intention to replace Yahoo's board of directors in an effort to consummate the sale of the company to Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT).

Throughout the three dramatic months of resisting against Microsoft's bid, Yahoo came forward with a series of announcements of new products, partnerships and developer initiatives. Today's opening of the developer platform, after three weeks of a very limited preview, is the company's first major announcement since Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) pulled its acquisition bid off the table.

Amit Kumar, Yahoo's director of product management for search, said that SearchMonkey is at the center of the Yahoo Life initiative, where the portal is opening its doors to the developer community to recast itself as the crossroads of the social Web.

"Search engines so far haven't taken full advantage of the fact that there's all this structured data," Kumar told InternetNews.com. "This is the beginning of the next generation of search."

Among the major search engines, Yahoo is not alone in updating the results pages to incorporate data of multiple formats. Through Google's (NASDAQ: GOOG) universal search initiative, for instance, images, videos and other types of content are returned with regular Web pages in search results. A search for a place of interest through Google, Yahoo or MSN will often produce information such as an address, picture or map. ...

But the reality is that the open source Web browser engine is far more, with a broader range of uses and a number of vendors besides Apple participating in its development.

WebKit is now poised to grow even further in importance thanks to the efforts of Trolltech, which makes Qt 4.4, a C++ application development framework that enables developers to write applications once for deployment on multiple platforms, including Windows, Linux/UNIX and Mac OS X.

Qt also is well-known as the application development framework behind the open source KDE Linux desktop.

If the framework's supporters are right, integrating WebKit could become the catalyst that spurs Qt (pronounced "cute") to mobile and desktop dominance as it melds the offline and online into a seamless user experience.

"When you look at Qt 4.4, the most exciting feature is the WebKit integration," Benoit Schillings, Trolltech's CTO, told InternetNews.com. "It's a model that reconciles the DHTML, AJAX-type of development and the more traditional C++ development." ...

AJAXanchors the lightweight end
The lightweight tools are anchored by AJAX or Web 2.0 applications, which add richness and responsiveness to standard Web sites with asynchronous JavaScript libraries: that's the "AJA" part of "AJAX." The "X" stands for "XML," but these days XML is not the only data format used by such libraries; it's also common to see asynchronous data exchange in JSON, HTML, and plain text formats.

[ InfoWorld's Tom Yager and Galen Gruman think Adobe AIR is really cool and useful. But Martin Heller isn't so sure. See who you agree with. ]

AJAX is powered by several technologies. One key piece is Dynamic HTML, a browser feature that allows JavaScript libraries to manipulate the contents of a page on the client, even after it has been initially displayed. Another key piece is XMLHttpRequest, which is a lightweight back channel to the server that JavaScript can call from the client.

AJAX is used to extend a wide variety of Web server application technologies. You can, of course, use it to enhance otherwise static HTML pages with data-driven content, but it's more customary to couple AJAX on the client with scripted Web servers. Ruby on Rails makes adding AJAX features especially easy. Microsoft ASP.Net AJAX, as the name implies, enhances ASP.Net sites with AJAX features, and includes Visual Studio integration; the Microsoft AJAX Library can also be used with other types of sites. Integrating AJAX libraries with Java/JSEE sites can be done manually with some effort, but tools and libraries such as the Google Web Toolkit, Tibco General Interface, and ThinkCAP JX make it much simpler....

But the new release may also signal growing competition with Zend, PHP's lead commercial sponsor, and the maker of Zend Studio IDE.

Version 2.0 of CodeGear's Delphi for PHP follows the launch of Zend Studio for Eclipse and Zend Platform 3.6 in January -- efforts that together come as enterprise adoption for PHP continues to grow, as do the number of tools for developers.

Among the improvements in Version 2.0 of CodeGear's IDE is support for Templated Forms, which provides a degree of code separation impossible in the previous version.

"It supports embedded PHP in the HTML at design time, allowing developers to manage their HTML as part of the project," Nick Hodges, Delphi product manager at CodeGear, told InternetNews.com. "It also enables developers to separate code and HTML presentation, like ASP.NET, by using embedded tags in place of components."

Other improvements include broader database access and a vastly improved editor with new, productivity-enhancing features.

Despite what might seem to be treading on Zend's turf, CodeGear's supporters say the two offerings have widely different focuses.

For one thing, CodeGear promotes Delphi for PHP 2.0 as a Rapid Application Development (RAD)-based IDE -- as a result, it differs dramatically from the Eclipse-based Zend Studio IDE....

The company's App Engine service -- which will be offered free to developers during a preview period -- includes a software development kit, enabling developers to write Web applications and upload them to the company's servers for hosting.

Also through the service, which Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) unveiled yesterday during its Campfire One developer event, application developers will have access to persistent storage technologies such as the Google File System (GFS) and Bigtable, a distributed storage system for unstructured data.

"With Google App Engine, developers can write Web applications based on the same building blocks that Google uses," Kevin Gibbs, Google's technical lead for the project, wrote in a company blog. "Google App Engine packages those building blocks and provides access to scalable infrastructure that we hope will make it easier for developers to scale their applications automatically as they grow."...

Fortunately for fans of the open source Dojo Toolkit, its new version 1.1 release offers improved stability and performance. That's important considering the large role that Dojo plays in the Ajax community, as one of the most widely used Ajax toolkits and one of the highest profile -- the toolkit has the backing of some high-profile players, including IBM, Sun, AOL and Nexaweb.

"The Dojo 1.1 release is primarily about stability," David Boloker, chief technology officer for IBM Emerging Internet Technologies, told InternetNews.com. "This release includes nearly 600 bug fixes, and it remains compatible with the previous 1.0 release."

Boloker added that with this release comes a new API reference tool as well as additional user interface themes. There are also new widgets, such as the BorderContainer layout, an analytics package and other enhancements designed to make Dojo easier to use.

While the 1.1 release is a point release over the 1.0 release, many users are still running with the older 0.4 release. Dojo's developers are quick to encourage users to migrate to the latest edition....

However, setting aside security issues associated with using Web 2.0 applications, educators have concerns about risks for K-12 students and wasting time. Many are banning school use of the very applications (e.g., social networking, blogs, wikis, chat) integral to online learning systems (Nagel, 2008). Even without a ban, another contributing factor for avoiding Web 2.0 might be educator fears about changing their teaching methods to better engage learners. The International Society for Technology in Education's (2007) release of National Educational Technology Standards for Students: The Next Generation indicates that to learn effectively and live productively in an increasingly digital world, students should know and be able to use technology for creativity and innovation; communication and collaboration; research and information fluency; critical thinking, problem solving, and decision making; digital citizenship; and technology operations and concepts. Thus one might say such banning limits development of skills valued for the 21st century.

Maybe the concerns for Web 2.0 are presumptuous, as there are safe sites that educators can use. It takes time to explore for what's available, time to experiment with tools of interest, and extra time is something that most educators don't have. But, if you can convince yourself of the potential of Web 2.0, you might be able to convince others. Here's a primer for the unknowing and those who want to take their technology use to the next level....

However, Ozzie and corporate vice president of developer platforms Scott Guthrie, did announce several concrete steps coming as early as today, aimed at helping achieve key goals in the company's evolving software-plus-services strategy. Included were the announcements that some long-awaited pieces of the puzzle are shipping in beta as of now.

For example, one of Ozzie's pet projects is the recent expansion of Microsoft's cloud-based Online Services for Business to customers with fewer than 5,000 users – bringing its Microsoft-hosted business services to small and medium-sized businesses later this year.

"[We're providing] the power of choice as the enterprise moves to embrace services in the cloud," said Ozzie, who is Microsoft's Chief Software Architect. "It's going to come from the inevitable shift to utility computing in the datacenter and in the cloud."

While Ozzie said little that he hadn't articulated before, he did announce a developer preview of a new, upcoming cloud service for businesses and developers. "Today, we're introducing a beta of SQL Server Data Services," he said.

The service is designed for developers building Web-based applications that need a scalable, easily programmable and highly available utility-based data store, according to company statements.

Internet Explorer 8 Preview

In addition, the company demonstrated several new features coming in Internet Explorer 8 (IE 8).

IE general manager Dean Hachamovitch demonstrated IE 8's new "super standards" compatibility mode to show that the next major release of Microsoft's browser will display Web standards-compliant pages as accurately as the Firefox and Safari browsers do.

"My son asked me, 'Daddy, did you guys break the web?'" he joked, referring to the company's spotty attempts to provide consistency in Web page display.

Over the years, Microsoft has taken plenty of criticism for not completely supporting Web standards and, in fact, on Monday announced the new browser will default to super standards mode – in part to help head off yet another investigation of its business practices by the European Commission.

"IE 8 will support by default the best compatibility that we can provide," Hachamovitch said. He also showed off new developer tools and features coming in IE 8, including support for cascading style sheets (CSS) version 2.1, as well as the addition of debugging tools built into the beta browser. Another new feature – called "Web slices" – will enable developers to write Web pages that allow users to subscribe to parts of a Web page instead of the whole thing....

Jay Batson, who was the founding CEO of open source VOIP software company Pingtel, is also part of Acquia's executive team. Acquia is getting $7 million in funding to start from a number of backers, including North Bridge Venture Partners, Sigma Partners and O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures.

"Drupal has grown organically, and I think that the software has matured enough at this point that we can take it to the next level and reach out to a different class of users," Buytaert told InternetNews.com. "In order to get there we need to do distributions and support and make it easier for people to deploy Drupal. I think the timing is right. We have a large installed base, so I think all of the stars are aligned for us to jump on this opportunity and advance Drupal to the next level."

Acquia's Drupal distribution will take the core Drupal content-management system and add in up to 30 additional modules from the community to expand functionality.

The entire package will undergo additional testing to ensure enterprise grade stability. In addition, Acquia will offer full technical support for its Drupal distribution. Currently, open source Drupal users rely on community resources such as mailing lists and discussion forums for support.

Buytaert noted that Acquia will also offer Network Services as hosted offerings on Acquia's infrastructure to provide deployment and monitoring capabilities for Drupal sites. ...