OpenTangent

It's been said that the hype around HTML5 and CSS3 has been exaggerated and even abused for marketing purposes . It's certainly true that HTML5 is evolutionary rather than revolutionary but it addresses so many obstacles for web development that i believe the impact will warrant the hype. There are some major technological advances such as HTML5 WebSockets and the popular  video and canvas elements but i think the real advantages will come from CSS3 (the style sheet mark-up language that accompanies HTML5). CSS3 will allow designers to make very rich interfaces with relatively little effort and without the need for any third party plugins like Flash. With these two standards specifications in place, web applications rather than  legacy PC applications  (as Google calls them) should become a very viable option. There was another bottle neck for web apps however and that was the inability of web browser's of the time to render rich content, quickly. Web browsers were nev

Just another iteration in the web codec saga; Google's WebM project and the included  VP8 codec  has been released under the unadulterated open source BSD license . For me this is the turning point in the open vs proprietary battle as video is arguably a prominent aspect of computing. With previously dispersed standards and licensing, video support in computers and devices like smart phones and DVD players was difficult and expensive. We now have the ability to serve the best possible video to even the cheapest of devices and now that it's open, thanks to the BSD license there's a good chance that digital video as a whole will stay open. As can be expected; Google once again takes an active approach to open standards . Initially they amended the BSD license with patent clauses that would deter patent pirates like Microsoft from entering into lawsuits against Google. Those clauses would effectively disallow the use of WebM and the VP8 codec by the suing party if a lawsuit