Fav5

Happy Halloween! It's been a busy few weeks since my last Fav5. Here they are, my pick of the week's top 5 items of interest:

1. I've heard a lot of people complaining that the Web is making people dumb, but some new research shows that surfing the Web may actually help stimulate your brain. Of course, any activity that challenges your mind will accomplish the same thing.  
   
   


2. A study by browser maker Opera (based on 3.5 million crawled web pages) shows that only 4.3% of the Web is using standards-compliant XHTML, and half of the sites that display a standards-compliant badge are actually not standards-compliant. Other findings:
   
   
   
   • Adobe Flash is used on roughly 35% of all websites
   
   
   • Flash is most popular in China (used on 67% of Chinese websites)
   
   
   • Ajax is used on 3.2% of websites
   
   
   • JavaScript is used on 75% of websites
   
   
   • CSS is used on 80% of websites
     
     
   
   
3. Those of you interested in GUIs and HCI might want to read an interesting blog post on pie menus. 
   
   


4. The Deep Web gets even smaller: Google is now indexing the text in scanned PDFs.
   
   


5. Matt Cutts points out a scary change to Google's robots.txt file.