WHATWG, RIAs and online/offline applications

TechCrunch has a really useful survey of the current status of browser storage, what it really means, how it relates to WHATWG's work on HTML5, [Google] Gears and current and forthcoming browsers. It's explained a lot to me and given me at least the idea that WHATWG's work is coming to something. Looks like we can't yet know quite how the RIA technologies like AIR, Silverlight etc will tie in with this, but the article ends on a very optimistic note about being able to programme to one API since the only mature product (Gears) should be fully HTML5 compliant. All good.

KML goes open

ReadWriteWeb comments on Google's announcement that KML is being handed over to the Open Geospatial Consortium. As RWW says: "For something as boring and painful as it is - standards work is very sexy". This gives us all more confidence that it is a format that's going somewhere and should be reliable for a good while to come. No more hangups about being too tied to Google's proprietary format. Cool!