I came across this article of how Apple is selectively implementing HTML5 and putting out a lot of disinformation about following standards.

Apple is hyping HMTL5 again, this time with a new website purporting to show open web development in action. But the company’s standards-following rivals have pointed out the Jobsian site is peddling nonsense.

Apple’s HTML5 ’standards’ hype debunked • The Register

Their ship is already sinking. Mobile is the next thing, and they need to wake up and smell the coffee, they represent a minor percentage of the market. The rest are all jumping in on open standards. Even Nokia has now made the Symbian OS open source. Other large players are beginning to realise it is in their benefit to follow open standards, because no one company is ever going to corner the market on technology. There will be always a new player out of no where. And the best way to control the competition is to ensure that the market follows the agreed open standards. Those who don’t live up to the standard, will whither and die, because the end user will have a substandard experience. Because what are the content developers going to develop for? Why the largest market / platform there is of course! Why else did Microsoft’s vision of things hold dominance for so long? Because they had the largest platform / market share. But that is no longer the case. The platforms that people access their information is rapidly diversifying, and so Microsoft have been caught napping. They thought there was no end in sight for the dominance of the desktop platform. Then along comes mobile. Bam! Now its a desperate catch up, which they will never do. Their worst nightmare is being realised. Linux is becoming dominant on mobile, largely thanks to Android. How can a commercial OS developer like Microsoft compete against a free OS like Linux? Answer, they can’t! So we come to Apple’s tactics. Build a jailed platform and broadcast propaganda. Hey fine for the fanatic converts, but they are fools to think they will ever win any sort of platform or market dominance like Microsoft ever did. So their pick and choose implementation on HMTL5 will ultimately backfire on them as it did with Microsoft and earlier web standards. Developers will curse their name, and develop for them second, if at all. They will ultimately be force to also play catch up.

 Life as a modern web developer would not be bearable without a decent debugger tool such as Firebug for Firefox. It allows you to debug your JavaScript, inspect XMLHttpRequests, the DOM, CSS, and edit them.

While I love Firefox and Firebug, there are other browsers out there that I also have to develop for, the dearth of decent debugging tools these has often left me grumbling and lamenting.

But on one of those procrasting whims, I started googling. And much to my suprise I discovered that the latest version of Opera, 9.5, comes with a built in debugger called Dragonfly.

Dragonfly is only in beta, but what it offers so far is very promising indeed. It may not have all of the features that Firebug currently has, but it is certainly a very useful tool as it is. With the addition of this feature to Opera, the browser is now a serious contender as a developer tool. One thing that was a little annoying, was that Opera's Dragonfly web page doesn't clearly state that, you only need to be using the latest browser, and can activate it under the menu option Tools / Advanced / Developer tools.

My curiosity then led me on to look at Safari next. And yes, there appears to be a similar tool also, but after server attempts at following the instructions from multiple websites I can't activate it. The steps one has to go through to enable it are counter intuitive. With both Firefox and Dragonfly, they are easily accessible via a menu of icon. So I've given up on Safari's development tool until they make it easier to access.

Now there is one browser yet to mention, and I hear the collective groan, Internet Explorer. Once the darling, it is now the millstone around the necks of developers across the world. For years they have had a developer tool in beta, that just has never progressed anywhere. It doesn't even offer an integrated JavaScript debugger.

The future of browsers is becoming very competitive again, with those clearly moving in the right direction, the others that need to pick up their game or be left out of it.

IBM joined the OpenOffice.org open-source community and will contribute code to the office suite that serves as an alternative to Microsoft's Office software.

IBM Throws Weight Behind OpenOffice.org Project -  PC World – Monday, September 10, 2007