Today I put in a request for the Widgets 1.0 Requirements to be republished by the W3C. I pretty much completely reworked every aspect of the document. I hope it’s much more clear now as to what is needed from the widgets 1.0 spec. Please send us feedback to public-appformats@w3.org.
What’s new in the document? Continue reading Widgets 1.0 Requirements Updated!
May was a fairly uneventful month. I spent most of my time just working on my PhD confirmation document (read the finished draft) and made but a few editorial changes to the Widgets 1.0 Requirements document.
I’m supposed to submit the confirmation soon (on June 13th to be exact). I still have a bit of work to do on it, especially in regards to methodology and a contextual review of widgets and widget engines… a contextual review basically looks at what widgets are, what they do, and what are the forces (markets, usefulness, web 2.0, etc) that are driving the continual popularity of widgets. As one can imagine, the contextual review is an ongoing process.
In regards to the requirements documents, I’ve was quite influenced by a chapter I read from the book Advanced Topics in Information Technology Standards and Standardization Research. In that book, there is a chapter title “Open Standards Requirements”, by Ken Krechmer, that provides a set of criteria for basically deciding if a standard is “open”. I took a few idea and used them in the requirements document to make sure that the standard remains “open” as defined by Krenchmer and that no one company controls it… even if not all widget engine vendors are taking part in the discussion.
Finally finished the Creative Industries Network Alerts Widgets (CIAlerts.widget Yahoo! flat-file, ~250k). Its purpose is to allow system administrators at QUT, where I work, to send out network alerts to staff and students when things go wrong on any of the servers.
You are free to download it, but be warned that you probably wont see very much (if anything) because it requires that someone send out an alert; and only Admins at QUT, where I work/study, can do that. The widget’s dynamically loaded source code is also available.
The widget is accompanied by a website from which the alerts are sent. Network admin can send three kinds of alerts: “Please Note”, “Attention”, and “Very Important”; each kind of alert comes with its own color (as seen above and below).
Using XMLHttpRequest, The widget works by periodically polling the server for new alerts. The alerts are sent as a JSON header string and processed in the widget. The widget features: