SAP and the UN track seven billion people. Image: screengrab

The earth welcomed its 7 billionth person today. Or thereabouts. In predicting the arrival of this major milestone, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) admits the margin of error could be as high as 56 million people.

The UNFPA doesn’t have the technology needed to monitor the birth of every baby on the planet. But it can make an educated guess using census data, other surveys, and population registers. And with a little help from software giant SAP, it aims to provide some additional insight into the length and breadth of the ...

Ian Hickson, editor of the HTML5 specification, has decided to drop the proposed <time> element from HTML5. The loss of the time element means, among other things, that there will be no semantically meaningful way to specify publication dates in HTML5.

Hickson claims that the <time> element wasn’t being used for two of its primary use cases, namely easier CSS styling and to indicate publication dates for web documents. He goes on to argue that the third main use case for the time element — writing dates in a machine readable format — is better handled by the more generic <data&gt...