Kahuna Coming

Just last week, I posted about how impressed I was with Outlook Web Access 2003. On slashdot today along comes the story that MSN Hotmail is going to undergo a much-needed Ajax facelift (called "Kahuna"). The screenshots look very similar to Outlook Web Access 2003 but with ads, so I'm sure most of the code is shared.

The update is going public some time in 2006, though phase 2 of the deployment, rolling out to 200,000 "technical enthusiasts", is starting today. Hey, I'm an "enthusiast" too...maybe I was 200,001st on their list...

This is good news, not just because Hotmail feels woefully outdated after using Gmail for a year, but I'm sure this means they'll maximize their user base and ad revenues (and avoid holy wars) by fixing the broken bits in Outlook Web Access when using browsers like Firefox and Opera. Those fixes should logically trickle back to Outlook Web Access 200x and this would strengthen the case for alternative browsers in the corporate environment.... Hmm, maybe it's not so "logical" after all 😉

§164 · October 11, 2005 · Ajax, Firefox, Opera, QuickLinks, Software, Technology, Web · Comments Off on Kahuna Coming ·

New CDF Working Draft

A new draft of the Compound Document Framework and WICD Profiles was released last week by the W3C and is available here. CDF/WICD (or whatever they end up calling it) is an important specification that will help to define how browsers should deal with "compound documents". An example is an XHTML document that has SVG elements embedded in it. As XML continues to replace HTML as the language of the web, such a specification becomes more and more important.

And it's great bedside reading, too!

§159 · September 21, 2005 · QuickLinks, Software, SVG, Technology, Web, XML · Comments Off on New CDF Working Draft ·

Opera Now Ad-Free

As speculate last month, the Opera has now removed the ads from its desktop web browser. If you're interested, go download it.

§158 · September 20, 2005 · Opera, QuickLinks, Software, Technology, Web · Comments Off on Opera Now Ad-Free ·

IE7 Will Not Support application/xml+xhtml

A presumably candid post from the IEBlog reveals that Internet Explorer 7 will not support the MIME type "application/xml+xhtml". The reason given is that implementing this in IE7 would be done using the HTML parser and could end up being a hack. Chris Wilson hints that a future version of IE will support the MIME type and it will be implemented properly. As long as the release schedule for Internet Explorer is under a year per version, I'm happy with that.

They do reveal that IE7 will properly skip the xml prolog and handle XHTML in strict mode (instead of quirks mode). He also states that it is relatively easy to configure a web server to serve text/html instead of application/xml+xhtml when the user agent does not support application/xml+xhtml. This is a step forward, but it looks like XHTML will still go nowhere until IE8.

§157 · September 16, 2005 · QuickLinks, Software, Technology, Web, XML · Comments Off on IE7 Will Not Support application/xml+xhtml ·

Firefox 1.5 and Vulnerability

It seems that every tech website out there is simultaneously mentioning that Firefox 1.5 Beta was released and that there was a security flaw detected (PCWorld, ZDNet, Slashdot) .

Anyway, Mozilla released a workaround for this bug and it looks like that security flaw has also now been fixed. Look for this fix officially in Beta 2.

§153 · September 11, 2005 · Firefox, QuickLinks, Software, Technology, Web · Comments Off on Firefox 1.5 and Vulnerability ·

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