Providing Web Services: Moving Away From PlaceDuring the early years of the Web, before content had semantic meaning, sites were developed as a collection of “pages.” Sites in the 1990s were usually either brochure-ware (static HTML pages with insipid content) or they were interactive in a flashy, animated, JavaScript kind of way. In that era, a common method of promoting sites was to market them as “places”—the Web as a virtual world complete with online shopping malls and portals.In the late 90s and especially the first few years of the 21st...

Crawling robot reveals how fish evolvedThe first animal to crawl onto land from the ocean probably looked a bit like today's salamander, and researchers have wondered how it was able to switch from swimming to walking. Now, European scientists have built a robot with a primitive electric nervous system that they say mimics that change in motion. The robot doesn't look much like a salamander it's nearly a yard long and made of nine bright yellow plastic segments each containing a battery and microcontroller but it does seem to move like one. The...