baron writes with a blog post explaining in detail why 99.9% of S. Korea uses Windows. This amazing tale began in 1998 when Korea decided it couldn't wait for SSL to be standardized (which it was in 1999) and commissioned an ActiveX control for secure Web transactions. At first there was a secure Netscape plugin too, but we know how that story ended. Quoting: "This nation is a place where Apple Macintosh users cannot bank online, make any purchases online, or interact with any of the nation's e-government sites online. In fact, Linux users, Mozilla Firefox users, and Opera users are also banned from any of these types of transactions..." Now that Microsoft has made ActiveX more secure in Vista, every Web site in S. Korea is scrambling to get things working again and the government is advising citizens not to install Vista. At the end of all this work, they will still be a monoculture in thrall to Microsoft, with millions of users sitting behind some of the fattest pipes in the world.

Randall Bennett writes "RSS 0.91's DTD has been restored to it's rightful location on my.netscape.com, but it'll only stay there till July 1st, 2007. Then, Netscape will remove the DTD, which is loaded four million times each day. Devs, start your caching engines."

An anonymous reader writes "In the standard definition of RSS 0.91, there are a couple of lines referring to 'DOCTYPE' and referencing a 'dtd' spec hosted on Netscape's website. According to an article on DeviceForge.com quite a few RSS feeds around the web probably stopped working properly over the past few weeks because Netscape recently stopped hosting the critical rss-0.91.dtd file. Probably someone over at netscape.com simply thought he was cleaning up some insignificant cruft." Some explanation has been offered by a Netscape employee.

bishiraver writes "Multiverse has announced that they have gained rights to a Firefly Massively Multiplayer Online Game. Multiverse is a company started by several former Netscape employees, and they have developed an engine/network that works for all of their games. They intend to break into the MMO industry by being an MMO publisher of sorts. By standardizing, they can provide a less expensive alternative to the tens of millions of dollars and several years it takes to currently develop an MMO. They have said they will hire out a studio to build the game for them. Corey Bridgets, Massive's Executive Producer, says: 'If you're doing science fiction, you have to really think it out and create an incredibly rich environment that is compelling in its own right, and worth exploring and going back to week after week. That's what Joss Whedon did with Firefly.'"

Trent Lucier writes "If you've browsed the web design section of any bookstore lately, you've seen him staring at you. The blue hat. The mustache. The blinding neon background. He's Jeffrey Zeldman, publisher of the influential web development magazine, 'A List Apart' and author of the book Designing With Web Standards (DWWS). The first edition of the DWWS was published in 2003, and now 2006 brings us an updated 2nd edition. In a market flooded with XHTML, CSS, and web standards books, is DWWS 2nd Ed. still relevant?" Read the rest of Trent's review for the answer.

Ben Rothke writes "In Search of Stupidity gets its title from the classic, albeit infamous business book In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America's Best-Run Companies, by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman. In Search of Excellence quickly became a best-seller when it came out in 1988 and launched a new era of management consultants and business books. But in 2001, Peters admitted that he falsified the underlying data. Librarians have been slow to move the book to the fiction section." Read the rest of Ben's review.

Michael J. Ross writes "Anyone involved with the coding of Web sites likely knows that Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) should be used for styling the content of their sites' pages — setting text sizes and fonts, setting background colors, sizing margins, positioning images, and more. CSS allows the Web developer to specify the visual appearance of the site, separately from the HTML, and thus to be able to make changes in the future within a single stylesheet, rather than hunting through the HTML and modifying every occurrence of each affected element. The benefits of CSS are many, but so too can be the frustrations when the developer turns for help to CSS books heavy on theory and light on practical explanations. For every Web site 'cook' feeling the heat in their cyber kitchen, there is an ingredient that can help: CSS Cookbook." Read the rest of Michael's review,

CrashPanic writes to tell us TCS Daily has an article entitled "The Next Big Thing" which is about Multiverse. It does a good job of making the case for the evolution to a 3D web through the lens of the past history of Netscape. From the article: "Forces are coalescing that will produce a shift comparable at least to the spread of broadband. This change will have enormous financial, cultural and political repercussions, and the most interesting aspect of the coming transformation is that it will not be some new and unexpected thing. Rather, the Web for many will become the cliched 3D virtual reality that has been so overused as a literary and cinematic devise that most of us have forgotten how compelling that vision was when it first appeared."

rs232 writes to mention a C|Net article about the uncertain future of the popular anti-virus software companies. "I mention Netscape because, if you believe Symantec and McAfee, a similar situation is about to unfold within the security industry. Microsoft, again recognizing late that it had failed to seize upon this thing called security, is now about to bundle its own security solutions within Windows Vista and further enforce new security policies that lock out some third-party security solutions altogether. Vendors Symantec and McAfee have looked into the future and realized that people may one day speak of them in the way that we now speak reverently of the early builds of Netscape."

davidwr writes "Is Microsoft unfairly locking anti-virus companies out of Vista? Symantec and McAfee seem to think so and they aren't being very quiet about it, placing a full-page ad in the Financial Times. If you've found the ad online, please post a link."

Debra D'Agostino writes "Despite the media hype around Google CEO Eric Schmidt's appointment to Apple's board, CIO Insight Executive Editor Dan Briody says it's not that big a story. 'Apple and Google are already plenty tight,' he says. Arthur Levinson, CEO of Genentech, has been on both boards for years. And Al Gore and Intuit Chairman Bill Campbell are both Apple board members and advisors to Google. 'While it's fun to speculate about what an Apple-Google alliance could produce (GoogleMacs? MacGoogle? GoogleTunes?) this move is far from an alliance,' Briody writes. 'And even if it were, it wouldn't be first time that two upstart powerhouses have joined forces in an attempt to unseat Microsoft. Remember AOL-Netscape? Boy, they just steamrolled the team from Redmond, didn't they?'"

prostoalex writes "With the proliferation of social news sites relying on users to submit and vote for content, quite a few of newcomers to the industry face the need to pay top submitters or hire people away from other social news sites, the Washington Post reports. The phenomenon has also led to the appearance of the surfing jobs, where people are paid mostly to surf the Web and find out new links." From the article: "The system depends on a steady stream of contributors like Spring. Last month, Netscape said it would be the first to pay the most active contributors -- $1,000 a month to post at least 150 stories during that time to its newly redesigned Web site. The job qualifications are rather fuzzy, but an executive said active 'navigators' or 'social bookmarkers' provide a valuable service because they keep the site's content varied and fresh."

Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "Marc Andreessen, the brain behind Netscape, has spent the past several years engaged in an old-fashioned pursuit: rebuilding a traditional software company, Opsware, and trying to make it profitable, the Wall Street Journal reports. From the article: 'That he is making progress will be evident next week when the company expects to report a hefty quarterly revenue increase. In the process, he has settled down personally, morphing from technical whiz kid into serious businessman — the kind who delegates authority, makes sales calls in suits and dabbles in philanthropy. His experience helping bring Opsware back from the brink of financial disaster — in 2001, the company, then called Loudcloud Inc., staged a disappointing IPO and later had to completely overhaul its business to stay afloat — also has been formative, those who know him say.'"

Aeonite writes "The Information Revolution subtitled, The Not-For-Dummies Guide to the History, Technology and Use of the World Wide Web, is the second in a trilogy by J.R. Okin. The first book, The Internet Revolution, covering the Internet in general and the third, The Technology Revolution being a guide to The Impact, Perils and Promise of the Internet. I have not read either of those two books, but I believe that each can be read independently, and this review should be viewed in that light." Read the rest of Aeonite's review.

wh0pper writes "Digital Trends has a great opinion piece about how Netscape has lost its identity again in regards to their wanna-be Digg portal. One interesting fact I was not aware of is that Jason Calacanis is the person behind the new beta Netscape portal. A choice quote: 'If this business model sees the light-day and it looks like it will, Netscape readers will change from the baby-boomers of yester-year to a younger audience more interested in Jessica Alba's Bikini or Britney Spears than real intellectual news.' I've tried using the new beta Netscape site, and personally hate it. The little link to the external site and the frame to keep you on Netscape's site are deal killers for me. Does the general audience think it can compete?"

Dotnaught writes "AOL has re-launched its Netscape.com portal as a place where user participation is balanced by moderator control. The renovated site will feature community-driven news and user-submitted video, guided by editors called anchors. "The hive mind sometimes doesn't do a thorough job," says Jason Calacanis, CEO of Weblogs, Inc., a blog network acquired last year by AOL."

GenieGenieGenie writes "AP is running a story about Webroot's Spy Sweeper, specifically about the competition it's facing from Vista's bundled anti-spyware. Webroot's CEO David Moll maintains that 'The taking of a second-best product in this space [i.e. Vista's Defender, f.k.a. AntiSpyware] is akin to locking half the doors in your house,' but others seem to think that if Moll doesn't want his company to become a second Netscape, it would 'ultimately [...] need to offer more than just an anti-spyware package.' The interesting issue here is whether this need for broadening the offer would be the case also for other leading companies subject to similar 'bundled-with' competition."

An anonymous reader writes "Take a look at these full simple code examples for dynamic elements for your web apps, including: Ad boxes, Pop-ups, Spinners, and Tabs. Easy ways to show and hide content on the page." From the article: "Incorporating JavaScript into your page makes the page dynamic and creates a more compelling user experience. Users can get more data more quickly, look at information from different aspects, and seamlessly navigate the site -- and the site doesn't have to go back to the server for lots of pages. However, there's also a reason to avoid using JavaScript: browser compatibility. In the early days of flat HTML, Internet Explorer rendered pages differently from Netscape. Those problems were fixed, but when support for CSS was added, new compatibility issues arose. Now most of the CSS issues have been solved, but JavaScript compatibility issues have cropped up. These compatibility problems have no easy solution. You need to weigh the benefit of what the JavaScript is doing against the number of browsers you'll need to test against and support."

cahiha writes "In his blog, Jonathan Schwartz argues that Scott McNealy is single-handedly responsible for making network computing a reality. His timeline is something like that in 1992, the industry was focused on 'Chicago' (Windows 95), while McNealy bravely went his own way-- 'the network is the computer.' He goes on to claim that 'There is no single individual who has created more jobs around the world than [Scott McNealy]. [...] I'm not talking hundreds or thousands of jobs, I'm talking millions.' I have trouble following his argument: client/server computing and distributed computing were already widely available and widely used in the early 1990s. The defining applications of the emerging Internet were, not Java, but Apache, Netscape, and Perl. Sun's biggest response to Chicago was to attempt to establish Java as the predominant desktop application delivery platform, something they have not succeeded at so far. So, what do you think: is Schwartz right in giving credit to McNealy for creating 'millions' of jobs? Or has Sun been a company on the decline since the mid-1990s, only temporarily buoyed by the Internet bubble?"

An anonymous reader writes to mention a piece on the Harvard Business School site talking about Lessons from the Browser Wars; specifically, what can be learned about first-mover advantages and the upsurge in Firefox use? From the article: "As a tool for exploring how standards are set when new technologies hit the market, the browser wars exhibit many features we like to study: competition between two viable alternatives, rapidly improving technologies, the ability of firms to use strategic levers such as market power and channels of distribution, growth in demand leading to diffusion of the new technology through the population, and uncertainty. Thus, this is one example from which we can generalize lessons regarding the outcome of diffusion of innovation into a market."