Dashway Technologies

Let me put it clearly. HTML 5 will change the architecture of web development in a big way. If you are, or aim to be a web developer, you must be looking into understanding the new mechanisms offered by HTML 5 right now. Adopting the new standard or staying with the old methods is your decision, but make sure to give a full evaluation of what HTML 5 has to offer before making that decision. There are some tutorial emerging in the web that will allow you to start this learning and evaluation process.

Web site http://diveintohtml5.org is one of these sites. They are adding excerpts of an HTML5 book that will be published in 2010. At the time of this writing they only had published Chapter 4, the chapter about the canvas element. This canvas element is one of the most important game-changers of HTML 5. This is the element that will bring games, video and interactive graphics to HTML. This chapter should get you started with the canvas element. All decent, modern browsers support this element already.

If you have a modern, decent browser like Firefox 3.5, Opera, Safari or Chrome, check a demo of the canvas element here. Have fun moving your cursor. Beware: Internet Explorer users don't qualify!

There was a time when Microsoft Word emerged as new kid in the block to solve our needs whenever we needed to prepare prepare a letter or a school paper. It was simpler to use than the other market leader, and was integrated with some other nice tools.

About 15 years later, the market for word processing have changed a lot. Only a very small share of the documents that we redact in a word processor is actually printed on paper, or need page numbers. MS Word provides a lot of functionality what most of us almost never use. And this makes MS Word heavy, slow and very expensive (except for students - to which Microsoft almost give their software away to hook them on early in MS vice).

The truth is that we all have different needs, and there are alternatives according to our needs. Actually, MS Word never intended to be everything for everybody. Per instance, they failed to meet the requirements of the legal business and Word Perfect met the requirements of that vertical market very well. And, several of the player in this list have exploited these needs.

The two offline solutions listed below are full featured solutions catering those that want a  powerful office suite using with a simple and non-proprietary document format. The fact that they are free is a very nice plus. The open document format using them them is required by many countries and some jurisdiction of the United States. They want to be sure that they will be able to read their documents 1000 years from now, even if Microsoft chooses to abandon the software business to make cars (God forbid!).

The online solutions included here are light and simple word processors for those nomads that either do not own a computer, or have too many computers and require to have access to their documents from any of them, all the time.