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Please read Improving web site performance with Apache .htaccess for an updated version of this article.

.htaccess - gzip and cache your site for faster loading and bandwidth saving is one of the most popular posts on samaxes. It’s basically on how to compress and cache your site content with Apache and .htaccess file.

It works like a charm, but it’s not yet the perfect configuration for me. I wanted something that I can use out-of-the-box without having to rely on external extension modules or tools.

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There is a lot of momentum around Semantic Web and RDFa. This may be caused by the big milestone reached for RDFa, a Candidate Recommendation of RDFa in XHTML: Syntax and Processing.

Recently, several discussion threads have been started on the WHATWG mailing list around the effort of integrating RDFa into the HTML5 specification as XHTML1.1 and XHTML2 that will have it integrated.

While I was pretty aware of the Microformats activity, I can’t say the same about RDFa. But Manu Sporny makes it a lot easier. In fact, this is by far the most comprehensive explanation of RDFa that I have ever seen.

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samaxesJS is a set of utilities and controls, written in JavaScript, for building rich interactive web applications. The first extension is a dynamic Table of Contents script. The TOC control dynamically builds a table of contents from the headings in a document and prepends legal-style section numbers to each of the headings: adds numeration in front of all headings, generates an HTML table of contents, degrades gracefully if JavaScript is not available/enabled.…

Now that almost everyone has heard about HTML 5, maybe not all of you know what’s new for us developers. Lachlan Hunt and James Graham have presented on 2008-05-29 at @media 2008 in London Getting Your Hands Dirty with HTML5. I really find it a great presentation and a good start if you want to check what’s new with the new HTML/XHTML version. Lachlan Hunt is also the editor of The Web Developer’s Guide to HTML 5.…

Please read Improving web site performance with Apache .htaccess for an updated version of this article.

Last week I changed my hosting provider from Site5 to NearlyFreeSpeech.NET. NFSN is a lot more cheaper (I only pay for what I really use).

So in order to speed up my site and save bandwidth (the more I use the more I pay) I use .htaccess file to gzip my text based files and optimize cache HTTP headers. Although this site is powered by Wordpress which has some really great plugins to optimize PHP output I wanted a more generic solution which can be applied to all PHP web applications.

I also try to follow as much as I can the rules for high performance web sites so don’t be surprised if some Expires header seems too long (far future Expires header rule requires at least 172801 seconds).

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I’m really impressed about Microsoft responding to their customers and to the community. Microsoft Expands Support for Web Standards Company outlines new approach to make standards-based rendering the default mode in Internet Explorer 8, will work with Web designers and content developers to help with standards behavior transition.   Microsoft’s Interoperability Principles and IE8 We’ve decided that IE8 will, by default, interpret web content in the most standards compliant way it can.…

For those who are tired of the JSCalendar available skins, check my JSCalendar white theme. Preview: Demo: JSCalendar white theme…

Brad Neuberg from Sitepen wrote an extensive tutorial about Creating Offline Web Applications with Dojo Offline. What is Dojo Offline? Dojo Offline is an open-source toolkit that makes it easy to create sophisticated, offline web applications. It sits on top of Google Gears, a plugin from Google that helps extend web browsers with new functionality. Dojo Offline makes working with Google Gears easier; extends it with important functionality; creates a higher-level API than Google Gears provides; and exposes developer productivity features.…

Google announced Google Gears at Google Developer Day 2007. Google Gears is an open source browser plugin that will enable developers to create offline web applications using JavaScript APIs. As a developer, you’ll be able to make an application with the assurance that it will work offline and online across browsers. Google Reader is the first online application to offer “Gears-enabled offline capabilities”. After you load the Gears plugin you get a new icon at the top of your Reader window which enables offline capabilities of Google Reader.…

Although I’m not a big fan of the Dojo Toolkit, I’m impressed with the the Dojo Offline Toolkit. I’m confident that this will greatly improve the way some actual web applications work. What is the Dojo Offline Toolkit? Dojo Offline is a free, open source toolkit that makes it easy for web applications to work offline. It consists of two pieces: a JavaScript library bundled with your web page and a small (~300K) cross-platform, cross-browser download that helps to cache your web application’s user-interface for use offline.…