Html

Web protocol handlers are a new Firefox 3 feature that gives more power to RIA web applications. Basically, when a user clicks on a link with specific protocol, Firefox can send an HTTP(S) request with the link data to a web application. An easy example is a mailto: link:

Zoho’s recent blog post about why they used JavaScript and not Flash when building their offline version of Zoho Writer has led to some interesting but somewhat predictable responses [1] & [2]. I could have fallen into a predictable (but not necessarily interesting) response myself, but didn’t. Until I saw Ryan Stewart post the following:

ActiveState is ready to start rocking the OpenKomodo project. They have everything ready to go:

Adobe’s Ryan Stewart has a post on the friction between Open Web advocates and “RIA vendors”. I think Ryan does a good job describing the work being done at Adobe (and Microsoft) to become active in a larger ecosystem, namely open source and cross-platform. There are a couple bits I want to respond (emphasis mine):

Mozilla endeavors to promote open standards, while at the same time, create a better Web, even if it means using the “other guys” specifications and DOM extensions. Here is a summary of features added to Firefox 3 (Gecko 1.9) that either implement a good open specification or someone else’s DOM extensions - for the betterment of the Web:

Joel’s latest strategy letter is a long-winded diatribe on the current state of browser-based application development. There is some good stuff in there, but some of the metaphors are really stretched and the comparisons between desktop and web-based applications is a bit broken. Joel seems to think that web-based applications should support the same kind of features as desktop applications. This line of thought can only go so far.

Firefox 3 is expanding its rich WYSIWYG editing capabilities by adding support for the contentEditable attribute. Setting contentEditable to “true” allows you to make parts of a document editable. Firefox already supports using designMode to make an entire document editable. Here is a previous post about using designMode.