The guys over at London Web Standards are hosting a State of the Browser event this coming Saturday, which will see representatives from Mozilla, Google, Opera and Microsoft walk people through their browser, the technologies behind it and where they’re heading. Martin Beeby will be speaking about IE9 (which was only released this week, in case you missed it) and we’ll be down there tweeting and blogging from the event.

In addition to each of the browser guys, there’ll also be some breakout sessions in the second half of the day, covering mobile web, HTML5, CSS3 and some more browser specific love. Personally, I’m looking forward to Mathew Staikos from RIM talking about the ‘Dos and Don’ts on the Mobile Web’, Rob Hawkes on Canvas and Chris Mills from Opera talking about new CSS3 features.

Martin will be hanging around for the day, so if you have any questions about IE9, or anything else we’ve been up to then say hello. We’ll have some swag that we’ll be giving away throughout the day, so keep an eye on our Twitter feed on Saturday.

At the Drupal 7 Release Party just over a week ago, Mark Birbeck gave a presentation on RDFa and the Semantic Web, as Drupal 7 has just launched with native RDFa support. To be honest, I had little understanding of what RDFa actually was before I saw Mark speak, and after the talk I was nerdishly excited by the prospect of what RDFa can do.

RDFa expands out to mean ‘Resource Description Framework in attributes’. With me so far? No, I got lost about there as well. However, Mark went on to explain RDFa in context (which, funny enough, is what RDFa is about)…

The internet is meant to be consumed by people. That is, for the most part, people can cope with differences in layout, spelling, design and words and still absorb the meaning. However, machines have a harder time extracting meaning. This is where frameworks like RDFa step in to create what is known as the Semantic Web, which is boiled down to information marked up in a way that machines can easily understand it by giving that information context.

The main advantage of the Semantic Web is improved search, which pulls in information from across the internet and surfaces it in a way that is useful to users. Examples of this are already being seen in major search engines like Bing, Google and Yahoo! using RDFa to surface information in searches that provide more information than just a result.

For one such example, we did a search for Empire Records on the three mentioned search engines, with each returning rich results thanks to RDFa tagging…

Bing - Includes rich data about Empire Records

Google - Includes collated ratings from users

Yahoo! - Includes collated user rating and pricing information

However, one of the issues with RDFa is how do you make sure you are using the same attributes as everyone else? This is handled by RDFa vocabularies. Most search engines use a list of well known vocabularies, including Dublin Core (standard and academic), FOAF (people), hReview (reviews) and GoodRelations (products), with Yahoo! providing a decent list of accepted vocabularies and uses on their site (that is relevant to most major search engines). However, Google goes out of their way to use another system, based on their data-vocabulary.org site and is outlined on their support site. (UPDATE: As on November last year, Google have started supporting the GoodRelations vocabulary for products. Thanks Martin!)

Over the next week I’m going to boning up on RDFa tagging and having a play within our favourite CMSs. I’ve already found a list of plugins, extensions and native support (as mentioned with Drupal 7) and am going to report back on how to implement RDFa tagging in your site in the most painless way possible. In the meantime, head over to Mark Birbeck’s rather indepth articles ‘Introduction to RDFa Part I‘ and ‘Introduction to RDFa Part II‘ on A List Apart to read indepth about RDFa.

If you have any tips or hints to help out with RDFa in WordPress, Joomla, Umbraco or Drupal then comment or drop me a tweet at @Ubelly.

Google’s decision to drop H.264 video support from it ‘s chrome browser has caused a whirlwind amongst the web development community. Today the chromium blog went into more detail regarding it’s position and reasons for dropping H.264 support. The discussion from the community seems to fall into two camps.

Firstly, there are the pragmatists who point out that, software, hardware and workflows are geared up to support H.264 and that moving to WebM will involve an effort so herculean that the video market will fragment and HTML5 Video will not become widely adopted.

Secondly, we have the idealists. They believe, however painful the transition to WebM is, it will be better for the future of the Open web  and will ensure that future innovation is not stifled by licence fees.

On the web, as in life we need idealists and pragmatists… but on this issue which category do you fit into?

Want to integrate Messenger into your website? Microsoft has released an API called ‘Messenger Connect’ so now you too can Be Part of 300 Million “Shared Experiences” with Messenger Connect

PHPNW10: Call for Papers – PHP North West 2010 is on 9th October, so if you’re heading along to Manchester for the event and want to share stuff you know, why not run a session ?

Running PHP on Windows? If you’ve upgraded to WordPress 3.0, this might come in handy – How WordPress Updates Work when Running the WordPress on SQL Server Patch

Codenamed ‘Froyo’, Google’s latest Nexus One release 2.2 includes Android Application Error Reports and a new UI framework – “car mode” and “night mode” controls allow applications to adjust their UI for these situations

Google tackles VP8 video quality question. Some say VP8 isn’t as good as H.264, aka AVC, but Google points users to the WebM project blog for the answers.

Cisco helps build prototype for instant cities – Cisco is wiring a new South Korean city from top to bottom, making it one of the most technologically sophisticated urban centres on the planet.

ZenTracker lets you keep tabs on your kid’s location via Google Latitude – kids going AWOL? Track them down with the new location-based service built on top of Google Latitude.

Ubimark Adds Hyperlinks to Paperbacks – accessible via a smartphone and a web application, readers can click on a 2D hyperlink code in a printed book. Cool!

Take a tour of Mars through the eye of a telescope (soon, anyway!)  – Microsoft’s World Wide Telescope Ready for 3D Views of Mars

Chinese Supercomputer Is Ranked World’s Second-Fastest, Challenging U.S. Dominance – pumping out one thousand trillion mathematical operations a second (or 1.27 petaflops)

Adobe reveals magazine iPad-izer software – new viewer software lets publishers create splashy digital versions of their magazines – you can use Adobe’s new InDesign CS5 layout software to create the digital version. Adobe’s not giving up without a fight!

Tech Crunch UK reviews the new-look MSN UK. Opinions on the new look are welcome!

Google Goes Open Source With WebM, VP8 Codec  used to run video in Web browsers and devices under a royalty free license

Microsoft releases AppFabric caching software, BizTalk Server beta – release candidate includes in-memory caching to speed up Web applications

Beach Babes video hits 1000s of Facebook walls, but it’s malware  – thousands of Facebook users are reporting that they have been hit by a malware attack in the form of a video of young bikini-clad women on a beach. The virus developers really know how to get you guys to click through, don’t they…?!

Parallels starts selling Windows 7 upgrade tool, helping users to upgrade from older operating systems

Researcher offers arm to knife-wielding robot – brave researcher Sami Haddadin escaped unharmed – although the safety feature was left on. The sadist in me feels strangely cheated…

Google Urged to Bring Street View in Line With EU Law  as officials from 30 European countries met up to try and increase the blurring technique currently used. Can we get soft focus instead…? Much more flattering…

Mozilla wants to make Firefox a speedster …but will it ever catch roadrunner…?

New Bing ‘Navigate’ app for Windows Phone  calculates route and guides you as you drive with arrows and alerts. The big question is, what comedy voice can you choose?

Boy sues mother for Facebook harassment as she argues ‘parental duty’.  Although I want to agree with the mom, changing your kid’s Facebook and email password is a bit much.  Maybe talking with your 16-year old over a drink would provide for a more amicable solution?  Oh yeah, you also might want to actually have custody of the kid too.  Wow.

Photographers are suing Google Books for unauthorized distribution of digital images.  Apparently paying the the actual authors of the books isn’t enough.  Makes me think, does any one person actually own anything anymore?  Copyright reform please.

Microsoft is working on CoApp to make it easier to build and compile open-source applications on Windows.  Many projects have a variety of dependencies on libraries that aren’t part of the project.  CoApp makes it easier to check and acquire these packages so that source code will actually compile.

Apple Gives Adobe The Finger With Its New iPhone SDK Agreement.  Isn’t fine print great?  Basically this wipes out a couple million dollars in investment by Adobe, Monotouch, and a few others.  Daring Fireball has a great article about why Apple would do this.  This is what happens when one company is years ahead of the competition, they abuse the power.

Thumbnail source:  http://i245.photobucket.com/albums/gg65/bmerich/AppleFingerBite.jpg

Silverlight Analytics in Silverlight 4 provides an open platform for any vendor to extract valuable intelligence about how the application runs.  One of the biggest capabilities with Silverlight is the ability to use applications offline.  Before Silverlight Analytics Framework, vendors would pretty much be in the dark.  Microsoft now eliminates this constraint.  If you are a technologist or businessman, wouldn’t you like to know how your customers are behaving offline when using your app?

Now doing what Microsoft does best, coding software, we knew that providing a great development experience would be key for vendors, but on the web, designers play a crucial role.  I would argue that application designers are probably even closer to the functions of the application than the programmers, but even if you don’t buy this argument, wouldn’t it be great quantify your worth as a designer?  Microsoft allows designers to realize this as well by integrating Analytics Framework behaviours directly in the design environment in Expression Blend.  You can now directly relate the quality of design work down to the bottom line.  What designer wouldn’t want this? A bad one. This “who’s who” list of vendors serves as a testament to the openness and excitement of this new functionality!

• AT Internet
• Comscore
• GlanceGuide
• Google Analytics
• Nedstat
• Quantcast
• PreEmptive Solutions
• Service Oriented Analytics

Design Goals

• Support out-of-browser scenarios
• Support offline scenarios
• Support multiple analytics services simultaneously without impacting performance
• Support for designers in Microsoft Expression Blend to add tracking to applications without coding
• Support A/B Testing
• Support SketchFlow Prototypes
• Support logging of video experiences with the Microsoft Silverlight Media Framework

If you are interested in learning more, watch the breakout session video from MIX 2010.