Various Ideas

Matei Ripeanu, Munindar P. Singh, and Sudharshan S. Vazhkudai
Today's organizations are no longer constrained by traditional time and place barriers. Instead, information technology supports virtual organizations: flexible networks of independent, globally distributed entities that share knowledge and resources and work toward a common goal. Resources aren't limited to computing power, but include elements as diverse as storage, network links, data sets, analysis tools, sensors, and scientific instruments. Sharing policies are highly diverse, given that sharing must be controlled, secure, flexible, and limited in time.

TOWARD INTEGRATION
Demystifying RESTful Data Coupling
Steve Vinoski
Developers who favor technologies that promote interface specialization typically raise two specific objections to the uniform-interface constraint designed into the Representational State Transfer (REST) architectural style. One is that different resources should each have specific interfaces and methods that more accurately reflect their precise functionality. The other objection to the concept of a uniform interface is that it merely shifts all coupling issues and other problems to the data exchanged between client and server. Yet, that's based on the invalid assumption that the data exchanged in a REST system is just like the data exchanged in systems such as Web services and Corba, which require interface specialization.

Standards
Is HTML in a Race to the Bottom? A Large-Scale Survey and Analysis of Conformance to W3C Standards
Patricia Beatty, Scott Dick, and James Miller
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) promulgates the HTML standards used on the Web, but it has no authority to enforce the adoption of one standard in favor of another. In this environment, developers have some incentive to ignore up-to-date W3C standards given that the transitional versions of HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0 offer most of the capabilities of the newer ones but are being less stringent in their requirements. If most Web sites migrate to these “transitional” standards and remain there, future versions might be mere academic exercises for the W3C.