The Case for the Open Web

Alex Russel, dojo toolkit project leader, presented recently the slides below and I spotted "Web 3.0" on the cover slide ...

Prism - Turn any web page into a desktop app

Today Mozilla Labs launched Prism, a tool for easily turning web pages into desktop apps with their own window, desktop shortcut but no URL address bar (everything customizable, of course). It's not a new project, just the relaunch of what was previously mostly unknown as WebRunner. If the Mozilla guys do it right this time, Prism will compete head-to-head with Adobe AIR.

An early alpha version, currently only for windows, is available for download. I tried it out, for this blog, it is very easy to use, just one dialog for defining Name, URL and optional properties for the web page to be turned into a desktop app.

Google AdSense might mess up your page

Javascript expert Andrea Giammarchi points to some potential flaw in Google Adense. If you put on the same page Google AdSense and your own or other third party Javascripts, AdSense could mess with the others in a destructive way so that nothing works anymore on that page. The origin of the problem is that AdSense deletes properties of global objects, without checking whether these properties actually belong to AdSense.

What can one do to prevent problems ? The usual recommendation for dealing with the insecure aspects of Javascript: don't use global variables and put your stuff in your own namespace. See also my previous posts about Javascript security.

HTML5 movie trailer