W3C has formed W3C HTML working group in 2007 to develop HTML 5 with extensive features as the specifications of older version HTML 4.0.1 are inadequate for today’s requirements of web development.

HTML 5 will provide a number of new elements and attributes that reflect typical usage on modern Web sites. In older version, div elements are not used more specifically. HTML 5 addresses this issue by introducing new elements like <header>, <nav>, <footer> etc for representing each of these different sections. Such tags would facilitate indexing by search engines and handling by small-screen devices or voice readers for the visually impaired.

The video and audio on the web has become increasingly viable, and Flash is currently the only widely deployed plug-in that provides a cross-browser compatible solution with the desired APIs for developers. The plan is to provide player functionalities like play, pause, stop etc in browsers by adding native support for embedding video and audio and providing DOM APIs for scripts to control the playback. The new video and audio elements make this really easy.

Other notable elements are:

Section – It represents a generic document or application section. It can be used together with h1-h6 to indicate the document structure.

Article – It represents an independent piece of content of a document, such as a blog entry or newspaper article.

Canvas – It is used for rendering dynamic bitmap graphics on the fly, such as graphs, games, et cetera.

Command – It represents a command the user can invoke.

Datagrid – It represents an interactive representation of a tree list or tabular data.

Details – It represents additional information or controls which the user can obtain on demand. D

W3C have planned to release the proposed specifications in 2012, but that doesn’t mean you have to wait that long. You can start using some of the new things in HTML 5 as a lot of modern browsers have already implemented the <canvas> element like Mozilla Firefox which has partially implemented it since version 1.5.

In Washington, 17/12/2008, Yahoo announced that it will cut to three months the time it stores personal data gathered from Web surfing, making its retention policy the shortest among peers. Due to the pressure from European and other data protection officials to do more to protect the privacy of users, Google halved the amount of time it stores personal data to nine months. The European Union has recommended that Internet search companies keep data no more than six months and urged the sector to adopt an industry-wide standard.

Users of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7 are advised to use another browser like Mozilla Firefox, Safari, Google Chrome, Opera, due to a serious security flaw in the IE 7. The flaw in the IE is reportedly making it very easy for hackers to obtain personal data and passwords of IE users.
“Microsoft is continuing its investigation of public reports of attacks against a new vulnerability in Internet Explorer,” said the firm in a security advisory alert about the flaw.
Microsoft urged people to be vigilant while it investigated and prepared an emergency patch to resolve it. Microsoft is hurriedly putting together an emergency software patch to resolve the issue, but in the meantime if you are concerned about your privacy, we can only suggest that you seek an alternative browser.

Mozilla has released its latest version Firefox 3.1 beta 2 with the private browsing feature as in the Google chrome. Once the private browsing option in toolbar is selected, the system will not store any history, users can easily change into normal mode by clicking the private browsing option again. According to Mozilla, this is not the final tester update, expect one more beta version.

On 7^th December Intel announced that it is claiming “world record” for their future optical communication. Intel going to use silicon photonics for optical communication, particularly this will be useful for high bandwidth applications. Ultra fast transfer of date in future computers powered by many processors cores – Intel. “This research result is another example of how silicon can be used to create very high-performing optical devices,” the development can be used not only in optical communications but areas such as sensing, imaging, quantum cryptography, and biological applications, Mario Paniccia, an Intel Fellow and director of the company’s Photonics Technology Lab.

Million’s of Facebook users are in danger zone. Koopface is a new computer virus spread through Facebook message system. It will send the message from the infected person’s profile to his friends, the subject line is like “you look just awesome in this new movie” it will open into another website to watch the movie after clicking the website it shows a message to need an updated Adobe Flash Player. But the virus will download while updating Flash Player. Infected systems have the possibilities of stolen Credit card numbers. “Only a very small percentage of Facebook users have been affected, and we’re working quickly to update our security systems to minimize any further impact,” – Barry Schnitt, the Facebook spokesman in Palo Alto.

Wordpress has planned to do more update in their next release. It has around 400 program changes including 200 changes in main program, and fixed more blocker bugs. Comments, Theme & Plugin related and Greater controls are going to play main role in this. In December 10, Wordpress will release self hosted blogs. New icon designers selected from winners of their icon design contest, are also specially employed for this update.

Vlingo has launched voice control for iPhone, it helps to search google maps, dial a number, updating Facebook and Twitter. They have already done the same job for blackberry. Watch the demo and get the idea of how it was.

Power.com is a social networking site for new generation. Through power.com we can access other popular communities like Facebook, Myspace, Orkut, Hi5, know our friends updates and use the power.com feature on other network. “It forms a node for all the social networks”. They have planned to add instant messengers services like Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail, Spark, AOL and access to other social networks like Twitter, Flickr, linkedin also. The new version is design to mainly target U.S users.