When asked for my pearls of wisdom on this topic, I was tempted to respond with the excuse: "Sorry, can't comment. My asbestos underwear is out for dry-cleaning."

It seems both the emotions and mis-information surrounding HTML 5 run high.

And some information is just plain scary. Consider this direct quote from the W3C.

"The following elements are not in HTML5 because using them damages usability and accessibility:

Like me, I believe most people go about their business never to give a serious thought about their assumed private correspondence when using Gmail to email friends, colleagues and business associates.  As it turns out, your daily banter may not be so private after all.  A recent article in Fortune Magazine, “Judge Rejects Google Deal Over Email Scanning” caught my attention and an immediate thought dominated my curiosity…Google email and scanning scam.  

In essence, the article describes Googles’ agreement to change the way it scans incoming messages so that it no longer reads emails while they are in transit, but only when they are in someone's inbox! So, what exactly does that mean? Judge Koh, a San Francisco federal judge, said she's not so sure about that. Her ruling claims the settlement does not provide an adequate technical explanation of Google's workaround, which involves scanning in-transit emails for security purposes, and then later parsing them for advertising data. The judge also proposed a legal settlement to pay $2.2 million to lawyers, but nothing to consumers.

My interest in this story is not so much about the proposed settlements or the specific details about how Google or any of the web giants settle claims based on vague legal language. It is however, more about the naiveté of myself and perhaps many others that never question how the email scanning process really works. I wonder, do most of us really care that Gmail uses contents of our mail to display targeted ads?

The importance of variables in any programming language can’t be emphasised enough. Even if you are a novice, the chances are good that you will have been using variables for quite a while now.

They are the cornerstone of any language and without them we would not be able to accomplish much of anything. However, most of you up until this point have probably only been working with standard variables, variables which can hold single values such as an integer, a single character, or a string of text.

In this tutorial we are going to take a look at a more special type of variable called an array. Arrays can seem quite daunting at first glance but once you get used to working with them you will wonder how you ever managed to program without them.

The reason arrays are special is because they can hold more than one value. Think about this: say you create a variable which contains a line of text like the code below:

Businesses “Going Green” is so commonplace now it’s more than just an encouraging a trend; it’s become expected of companies big and small. In fact, consumers frequently place more of an obligation on companies to go green than they do themselves. The last few years—the infancy of what may turn out to be a green revolution—have really proven that there are many ways to go green, and that some of these ways are much more financially sound than others. But rather than providing a cut and dry list of green options and their pros and cons, I’d like to take a look at the bigger picture incentives for businesses going green and how consumers are responding.

What does it mean to be green?