Monday's recommended links

Written by Adrian Holovaty on September 23, 2002

IBM has an article on XHTML 2.0.

Two weeks ago, the Web site of the Recording Industry Association of America was hacked a few times. Now we know how they did it. The Register reports it was discovered that the site's robots.txt file (a file that gives robots instructions on which pages to ignore) pointed to the site's administration page, which wasn't password-protected. The lesson here: Never put anything in your robots.txt file that you don't want public, as I've said before. (Link from dive into mark)

And the big news of the day is that the new-and-improved Google News is now accessible to all users. Previously, it had been available only to selected users. (I was one of the lucky ones and reported this last week.) Everybody's talking about it: usability experts, webmasters, journalists and even Holovaty.com readers. For more, see the Reuters story and News.com story. Also, the ResourceShelf has more on what exactly is new about the site.

In the News.com story, a Google product manager who developed the site is dead-on about why this is an important innovation:

[T]his changes news reading habits because (usually) you pick a source and pick the story that interests you. With this service, you pick the story that interests you and then pick the news source.

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