Apple WWDC 2004 Day 2

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I realize this WWDC Day n thing isn't going to scale, as I'm following mainly the QuickTime stream here, and the NDA is rather limiting. However there were a few points I found worth reporting on, all related to the web stream.

The session on best practices in web development gave a nice shot of web standards (XHTML, CSS, DOM etc.) to the audience. It was didactic, not religious, and I found the Safari team pretty pragmatic about this as well as where they are compared to other browsers (at least the worst more prominent one.)

The web API WebKit (on top of which Safari is built, with about 80% of code belonging to WebKit) is extending into web authoring in addition to web rendering. Here too, considering the focus on web standards in WebKit, I expect some interesting developments on the front of better authoring of web standards compliant content.

Dashboard and its gadgets will IMHO push web standards into their limits, and this is good. Gadgets are web pages with a life out of the browser, leveraging the whole WebKit engine (XHTML, CSS, ECMAScript, DOM) and more (Flash, QuickTime, anything that runs within Safari). Evenso they have a plugin architecture (Cocoa code) designed to overcome the limitation of WebKit, I find it interesting that web standards are used for application interface design, because it can only lead to their improvement.

Lastly, I would like to quote Ben Hammersley on Safari RSS:

it occurs to me that the biggest change to be brought about by Apple’s inclusion of an RSS reader into Safari will be the beginning of the end of the need to provide explicit links to the things. The orange XML logo, the plain text link, the flashy little Subscribe to Me widgets. All gone. I yearn for the day.

I couldn't agree more, but even that RSS button and dedicated search box on Safari will have to go or be renamed before I'll be completely satisfied.