Ngoprek Web

Google lewat Senior Vice President-nya, David Drummond, akhirnya angkat bicara tentang kemungkinan akuisisi Yahoo! oleh Microsoft.

Ok, sekarang semua boleh panik.

So Microsoft’s hostile bid for Yahoo! raises troubling questions. This is about more than simply a financial transaction, one company taking over another. It’s about preserving the underlying principles of the Internet: openness and innovation.

I couldn’t agree more dengan yang terakhir, openness and innovation!

Yahoo! (dan Google) selalu komit dengan keterbukaan dan inovasi. Dua website yang saya yakin paling sering dikunjungi oleh developer seperti saya adalah YDN dan Google Code. Saya sendiri lupa kapan terakhir kali mengunjungi MSDN.

Dalam perspektif developer, kemungkinan pengambilalihan Yahoo! oleh Microsoft adalah sangat mengkhawatirkan.

Namun saya yakin, developer-developer Yahoo! tidak akan tinggal diam. Orang-orang yang terkenal sangat vokal seperti Douglas Crockford, javascript architect-nya Yahoo! pasti akan melakukan sesuatu kalau akuisisi itu terjadi. Dalam berbagai kesempatan dia sering menyebut Microsoft senantiasa membanjiri internet dengan bugs lewat browser IE nya. :p

Komunitas Open Source pun pasti tidak akan membiarkan dominasi software komersil Microsoft. Kita tahu Yahoo! banyak berkontribusi dalam komunitas Open Source.

Semua ini tentu saja kalau memang benar apa yang dikatakan David Drummond di atas, yaitu ini bukan masalah transaksi finansial semata, tapi juga persoalan prinsip.

Yahoo! developer blogs announced this in its post today. If you noticed, the previous Yahoo! Maps was build in hybrid of Flash and Javascript. I red somewhere that it was built in Adobe Flex. But now, it is full Javascript. The great thing is you can’t see the difference. Yeah, they’re good.

The important point and quite bothering me is this,

Lead Maps Developer Mirek Grymuza and the Maps team have done an amazing job of seamlessly moving the Maps client over resulting in at least double the performance of the previous Flash-based version

which brings me again to a question wheather flash based (or Flex based) apps is that slow comparing with Javascript.

Anyway, the enhanced version of Yahoo! Maps AJAX API with this new full Javascript version of the maps will be available in 2008.

YUI team in their blog announced the release of version 2.4.0. It’s available for download and full documentation on YUI website.

New components in this release includes Selector Utility (beta) which implements CSS selector, Charts Control which combine Javascript and Flash (version 9) to create dynamic chart in Flash, Get Utility which provides API for appending script nodes and CSS files to an existing DOM after the page has loaded and JSON Utility which provides methods for transforming data between native JavaScript objects and their JSON string equivalent.

The later seems a bit late to me, considering Douglas Crockford the man behind JSON is none other than Yahoo! javascript architect.

Anyway, i’m glad they finally have chart control component now. It’s pretty useful. I know there are some javascript frameworks out there that has this feature, but i like YUI more with its neat and clean structure. Easy to understand yet hard to make a mistake. What do you think?

It’s been like forever since the last version (ver. 0.12.2) of Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) was released. Some said they had stopped developing it and choosed another alternative instead. But Yesterday, YUI blog announced the release of version 2.2.0, and they’re going to have a party too.

It’s a pretty big jump from 0.12.2 to 2.2.0. But i personally don’t see that much of improvement. Although i must admit there’s certain features i’m thrilled to see next (currently still in beta), which are browser history manager and DataTable control.

The YUI Browser History Manager is an experimental component designed to facilitate the creation of web applications in which the navigation buttons are fully functional and in which broad aspects of an application’s state — what panels are open, what tabs are active, etc. — can be bookmarked.

The DataTable control provides a simple yet powerful API to display screen-reader accessible tabular data on a web page. Notable features include sortable columns, pagination, scrolling, row selection, resizeable columns, and inline editing.

The DataTable’s debut featureset includes:

• Progressive enhancement: DataTable is built on the foundation of HTML table element markup, providing a solid progressive-enhancement path.
• Nested column headers
• Custom sort functions
• XHR data sources: Integration with Connection Manager offers robust support for pulling in off-page data.
• Inline editing: Contents of cells can be editable, allowing users to update the information they’re reviewing.

Interesting to see how they can compete with the same DataTable component in Dojo.

Honestly, i’m not really comfortable with the term “widget”. Since the term is somehow confusing to me. Some people say it is derived from the combination of “window” and “gadget”. Then there is web widget and desktop widget. Huh?

But whatever the term, people know it, use it and some of them even dedicate their life to develop it. And it grows everyday to such a point that Newsweek is proclaming that 2007 as the Year of the Widget.

And things are getting more interesting. Today, Google Code team announced that Google Gadgets now can be converted to run in Windows Vista Sidebar and Mac OS X Dashboard. Using third party utility application, Mesa Dynamics. You can check out the converter for Windows here, and for Mac OS X here.

Not long ago, Yahoo! also proclaimed that Yahoo! Widget Engine 3.1 runs very well on Windows Vista, which makes Yahoo! Widget as totally cross-OS widgets platform that can run on Mac OS X, Win 2000, Win XP and Windows Vista.

You can easily imagine when two giants, Google and Yahoo!, run on the same field. It will make widget or gadget or whatever more interesting. I must agree with Newsweek if this year will become the Year of the Widget.

Finally, Microsoft, Google and Yahoo! announced today that they will all begin using the same Sitemaps protocol to index sites around the web. Now based at Sitemaps.org, the system instructs web masters on how to install an XML file on their servers that all three engines can use to track updates to pages.

What and why?

Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.

Web crawlers usually discover pages from links within the site and from other sites. Sitemaps supplement this data to allow crawlers that support Sitemaps to pick up all URLs in the Sitemap and learn about those URLs using the associated metadata. Using the Sitemap protocol does not guarantee that web pages are included in search engines, but provides hints for web crawlers to do a better job of crawling your site.

The protocol is offered under an Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons License, so it can be used by any search engine, derivative variations using the same license can be created and it can be used for commercial purposes.

People who use Google Sitemaps don’t need to change anything, because it has already use the protocol described in sitemaps.org, only now those maps will now be indexed by Yahoo and Microsoft.

If you're using Wordpress, you might like to use the sitemap generator plug ins here. I've been using it for couple months, and Google has indexed these pages beautifully.

I don’t know when it started, but i’ve just found out someone has cute custom logo generator here. From its subdomain (tst4php) i guess he used PHP for this. I wouldn’t surprise.

Cute isn’t it?