Embedded Systems Design - June 2008 - (Page 48)

guest editor BY Jim Turley Is the Internet still hardware-independent? T highlight dozens of differences he Internet: maybe in what was supposed to be a you’ve heard of it. It’s the standard presentation format. great equalizer and the Anything more exotic than an great enabler. Part of its beauty all-text page with blue underis that it’s global, it’s egalitarilined links is liable to look and an, and it’s free. Internet stanbehave differently on different dards like HTML, POP, and clients. Viewing a favorite site SSL were designed to be hardon your BlackBerry or iPhone ware-, software-, language-, is also likely to lead to frustraOS-, and byte-ordering neution—or amazement that it tral. It doesn’t matter what works at all. computer you’re using or what How did Web content get operating system you prefer. this way? It’s a combination of Internet standards don’t The Web is becoming an Intel- and simple human nature mixed care if you’re a PC or Mac Microsoft-centric medium. Is this a in with a fair bit of commeruser, big-endian or little-encial self-interest. After the inidian, using a fast new magood or bad thing? It all depends. tial “gee whiz” wore off chine or an old slow one. around 1994, most of us got That glorious impartialibored with plain-text Web pages. ty comes at a price, though. It’s hard to upshot is that today’s Web is becomSome Webmasters studded their pages ing an Intel- and Microsoft-centric imagine a less-efﬁcient way to transwith blinking text or ﬂashing borders. medium, just like PC software is. And port data than with 7-bit ASCII-enThat was about as creative as early there’s no reason why this situation coded HTML. But efﬁciency wasn’t browsers would allow. Remember, will change any time soon. Whether the goal in deﬁning the Internet’s inHTML wasn’t created with today’s that’s a good thing or a bad thing deternal standards; universality was. slick e-commerce economy in mind. It We’re willing to give up a little (okay, a pends mostly on your job. was intended for academics. lot) in transport efﬁciency in exchange Today, any decent commercial GETTING THERE FROM HERE for a single global network that everyWeb site uses Flash, Java, QuickTime, First things ﬁrst: is the Web really one can share. Or can they? Postscript, Real Audio, and any numplatform-neutral or has it become The answer, as with so many ber of other semi-standard extensions PC-centric? Anyone who’s spent an things, is yes and no. Although the Into the basic HTML underpinnings. hour surﬁng the Web on two differternet’s network plumbing is hardent computers has seen how pages of- These extensions have all become part ware-agnostic, most Web content is of the Web’s lingua franca: the lanten look different on different manot. guage of global Internet commerce. chine. Folks with a PC at work and a Web content has become less Mac at home are familiar with this ef- Increasingly, you can’t even read a portable and more client-speciﬁc over site’s basic content—never mind fect. Even changing browsers on the time. This didn’t happen by accident. browse the catalog or log in—without same computer (from Internet ExIt’s the result of both commercial installing the requisite helper applicaplorer to Opera, for example) can forces and simple human nature. The tions to read PDF or Flash ﬁles. Here’s where the problem starts. Jim Turley is the founder of Silicon Insider and an authority on Like any program, these helper applimicroprocessors, embedded systems, and semiconductor IP. He is cations had to be written for (or portthe author of seven books, the former editor of Embedded Systems Design and Microprocessor Report, and previous host of the ed to) each distinct combination of Embedded Systems Conference and Microprocessor Forum processor and operating system. The events. He can be reached at www.JimTurley.com. Adobe PDF reader for Internet Ex- 48 JUNE 2008 | embedded systems design | www.embedded.com http://www.JimTurley.com http://www.embedded.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Embedded Systems Design - June 2008

Embedded Systems Design - June 2008 Contents #Include Party Bit Programmer's Toolbox Cover Feature: Virtual Hardware Platforms for Embedded Software Validation Allocating Memory in MATLAB-to-C Code MDD and IDEs: Making the Twain Meet in Embedded Systems Design Avoid a Thrashing Guest Editor Advertising Index Break Points Marketplace

Embedded Systems Design - June 2008

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