At the Google I/O Conference HTML5 was on display. Google showed that every major browser except Internet Explorer now supports the CANVAS element and other HTML5 tags. That's one big exception though. Internet Explorer dominates web browsers the way Google dominates web search. Without IE support it's going to take a lot of pushing to make the canvas tag and others mainstream.

Microsoft has it's weight behind Silverlight and pointed out a few weeks ago that Silverlight has more installations that Chrome, Safari and Firefox combined. In typical Microsoft fasion they will fight for the closed platform under their control instead of an open web standard. For once, I think they may be right about it. Javascript is a great language but it's not what I would select to write a rich application for the desktop.

Google wants everyone to believe that Javascript plus HTML5 is going to replace all native applications. I just don't see that happening anytime soon. For one, Javascript is sent over the wire in source code form and then run in the browser. This is not the way most developers want to distribute their apps. Precompiled byte code in downloadable modules makes a lot more sense. It's smaller, it doesn't need to be compiled on the fly and offers at least some protection for developers from the average user tinkering with their code. If you want to offer the source code for your app over the web I'm all for it but Javascript forces you to send source code.

Silverlight isn't perfect. It's controlled by Microsoft and that is very limiting. I'd rather see the Mono project pushing Moonlight as an open source alternative.

I do think that desktop apps are almost dead at this point. With high speed connections and local storage there isn't much difference between a well architected web based app that supports and off-line mode and a traditional desktop application. I just don't think that the canvas tag and HTML5 are going to usher in this new era of web based programs.

Microsoft has released SuperPreview for Internet Explorer as a free trial download. SuperPreview is an upcoming feature in Expression Web 3 that lets web designers preview their web sites/pages in every major browser (even if you don't have it installed). You select the main browser you'd like to work in and then you compare your page to what it looks like in other browsers. If you have the browser installed locally, SuperPreview will use it to render the preview. If you don't have it installed locally, a web service is called that renders the page and sends it back to SuperPreview.

One of the neat parts is that you can highlight elements in your master browser and the preview shows where they should be in the other browser and where they actually are in the other browser. I'm looking forward to using SuperPreview for IE 6, 7 and 8 compatibility testing without resorting to virtual machines.

Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! have all agreed on a new HTML tag called the canonical link that will help your search engine optimization efforts.

Search engines have a hard time differentiating between similar links to the same page. For example, http://www.bvsoftware.com and http://bvsoftware.com go to the same page but Google may index them as two separate pages. Also, UNIX is case sensitive to search engines may treat BVSoftware.com and bvSoftware.com as two separate locations too.

If the same page on your site is considered two separate pages in a search index your page rank may suffer. Let's say the 10 people link to www.bvsoftware.com and 10 people link to bvsoftware.com. That means that each page in the index has 10 inbound links instead of 20 inbound links. Your inbound links are cut in half.

Until now, the most common solution was a 301 redirect. This is a special HTTP response code that tells a web browser that a page has permanently moved from one location to another. We use a 301 redirect on bvsoftware.com to www.bvsoftware.com. This helps keep our page rank high but it can be time consuming and almost impossible to create 301 redirects for every variation on a url.

That's where the new Canonical Link tag comes into play. The tag allows page authors to tell search engines which URL is the preferred one for a given page.

<link rel="canonical" value="http://www.bvsoftware.com/" />

  The tag goes in the HEAD section of your page. The tag is self closing so make sure you have a "/>" at the end. 

A couple of notes:

1) This tag is a suggestion to search engines and is not guaranteed to be used. 301 redirects and good link strategy is still important

2) You can not use this tag to redirect between domains. We can't redirect Domain1.com to Domain2.com using this tag

3) You CAN suggest SSL urls as the preferred format. https://www.domain.com

4) Don't abuse the tag to redirect users to non-similar content. The search engines are smarter than that now.

5) Try and use absolute URLs instead of relative ones. Point directly to the final destination because a chain of canonical links may not be followed.

Other links about the tag:

http://blogs.msdn.com/.....aspx

http://ysearchblog.com/....

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/canonical-link-tag/

Here's a quick update of browser stat changes to BVSoftware.com. Yes, it's not the most scientific pole in the world but it's interesting:

  So Firefox remained almost unchanged, Safari almost doubled and Chrome came out of nowhere to grab almost seven percent. We must have a pretty technical crowd with Chrome usage so high. It looks to me like Safari and Chrome have been taking IE share while Firefox is holding it's own.

Last year during the fall holiday season our site received 19.6% of our visits from IE6 or lower. This year IE6 and lower accounted for just 12.2% of visits. IE6 isn't gone but it's pretty close and by next year I expect it to be less than 3 percent of visitors. Internet Explorer 6 behaves so poorly with some CSS scenarios that every designer I know would like to stop supporting it completely. In fact, I've already started to see sites dropping official support for it. Encourage your customers, clients and users to upgrade to IE7 ASAP.

JQuery is an open source javascript library that makes it easier to developer cross browser animations, css changes and AJAX callbacks. We've been using JQuery for a while for custom programming projects and on our own web site. It's a great library.

Microsoft just announced that their ASP.NET team was working on improving the built-in asp.net ajax javascript library and ultimately decided that JQuery was better than building their own from scratch. This is a huge change for Microsoft since their normal operating procedure is to duplicate another technology, give it away for free or an extremely low price and then add one or two "ringer" features that improve the product but make it incompatible with the original. In this instance they have committed to not only including JQuery but also to not fork the code base and instead include the standard library.

I applaud Microsoft's decision and I think it can be directly attributed to Scott Guthrie's advancement in the company. He was the guy behind the original ASP.NET product, one of the biggest success stories for Microsoft in recent years. ScottGu has done more to keep Microsoft in the web 2.0 game than anyone else I know of. 

I'm also excited to mention that JQuery will be included in BV Commerce 5.4. We've been working on the service pack for a long time now and JQuery was always scheduled to be included. Microsoft's announce means that we bet on the right horse and will be working to remove the Anthem.net ajax code in the future.

If you're a BV Developer (or just an ASP.NET developer) you should take a look a JQuery as it will become more important to you in the future.

Google released their own web browser today, Google Chrome. Right now it's only available for Windows XP and Vista but I'm sure it will be cross platform soon. It's based on WebKit which is the same rendering engine that Apple uses for Safari. This is a good things for web developers as we won't have to support another new rendering engine. WebKit is open source and very standards compliant.

One major difference is Google's focus on simplicity. Taking a page out of Apple's playbook they've decided to strip away everything that isn't needed and deliver a rocket fast simple browser. They wrote their own Javascript engine that is supposed to be significantly faster and I suspect they've learned a lot from Gmail and other Google apps.

The clear business strategy is to deliver an application platform for the web. If they have a web browser that compiles javascript to native code for execution they've basically created the .Google Framework for Windows. The Microsoft .Net Framework compiles C# to an intermediate language which is then compiled to native code. Now Google can use their toolsets like GWT to compile dynamically to native code on a windows host. Imagine GMail running as fast as your native mail client. The last part that's needed is offline access. Google Gears provides that feature already.

 So, Google just delivered the tools to send a web application directly to your desktop running at near native speed. You don't need to learn Silverlight, Flash or Adobe Air. Just HTML and javascript.

The platform wars are moving beyond Windows vs. Mac vs. Linux to Silverlight Runtime vs. Adobe Air vs. Google Chrome