John Resig writes very positively about Jaxer. It runs Javascript on the server while serving documents to the client, with seamless communication between JS on the client and JS on the server.

Jaxer provides:

1. Full DOM on the server
2. Shared code between client and server
3. Database, file, and socket access from JavaScript
4. Familiar APIs
5. Integration with PHP, Java, Rails, etc. apps

In other news, IE8 will use the latest rendering mode by default for documents with the HTML5 doctype:

Finally, Good Math has a published a good defense of Google’s MapReduce algorithm.

• HTML 5
• HTML 5 differences from HTML 4

Woot!

After an internal build of Internet Explorer 8 passed the Acid2 test, they’ve announced that the new engine will only be used for sites with a special, opt-in meta tag:

It can also be triggered from the server via an HTTP header:

Firefox is unlikely to follow suit.

In other news, John Resig has done some testing on sub-pixel rounding across browsers.