Category: Technology

Categories
Browsers

Future Firefox and color management

Before the build copy of Firefox (known as “Minefield”) upgraded itself on my Mac, dying a horrible and immediate death in the process, one other change I noticed in the upcoming version of Firefox is that color management is now on by default.

I also noticed, again before the crash and burn death, that the new version seems to be much more efficient and fast compared to the old.

As pointed out in comments, Bobby Holley has an excellent discussion on color management and the state of Firefox. Bottom line, in the interests of performance, the new version of Firefox will have color profiles turned on, by default, for “tagged” images: images with embedded color profiles. I started embedding profiles for my pictures about 2 months or so, ago, in hopes that more browsers will follow this path.

It would be nice to have full color management, but I think support for color profiles in images is a good interim solution. This is also the approach that Safari uses, and hopefully Opera, too, eventually.

Categories
SVG

Proceedings of the SVG Open

Several of the papers at the SVG Open have been *posted online, including an interesting paper on bitmap to vector conversion, a topic I enjoy exploring.

It’s too bad that WebKit couldn’t be there to represent itself as an SVG viewer. It would be nice to see and compare the future of SVG implementation by The Three.

There’s a whole section on SVG and graphic design, another area I’m interested in; especially considering that SVG Effects have now been added to the Mozilla trunk. I downloaded the Mozilla Minefield build that included this addition, and hope to have some some of my own SVG Effects examples up soon.

I’ve also heard rumors (can’t find where, now) of funding for an SVG plug-in for IE so that we know we’ll have support for SVG in IE going into the future. It would be better to have a native implementation in IE, but with a plug-in we’re assured won’t go away, we can at least move forward in the use of SVG.

*thx to Michael Bernstein for link

Categories
Political Web

The web, attention, and truth

Tim Berners-Lee introduced the World Wide Web Foundation a couple of days ago. The focus of the organization, according to the site is to help make the web more open, robust, and accessible, all of which are commendable. But then Berners-Lee mentioned about ensuring the quality of the web through some kind of labeling system.

Short Sharp Science responded with:

Web licences to ensure that people only read sites they can handle are the next logical step. Fortunately it’s much more likely that the whole idea will quietly be forgotten, which will at least prevent Berners-Lee receiving one of the first “potentially misleading” badges for thinking it up in the first place. Let’s hope the World Wide Web Foundation and its laudable goals have a rosier future.

Karl Martino lists other responses, but brought up another effect associated with the “truthy label”.

Take the current campaign for President. How could a labeling scheme help or hurt?…I guarantee you a labeling scheme, in the political sphere, would favor the those who could utilize attention influence the most effectively, and have little to do with actual ‘truth’.

However, I don’t think we have to worry about the truthy battle any time soon, as I’m not seeing much interest in this announcement. Oh, mention of it has appeared here and there, such as in Karl’s post and in Short Sharp Science, and including this post by yours truly. But most of the web community is focused on some new advance in one or another of the browsers, implementation of a new CSS3 or HTML5 feature, or the invention of yet another server-side language that will kill all others. Well, with an occasional picture of a cat, vacation, or cute little cherub (because we do not live by tech alone).

Either the seeming indifference is due to the fact that the web has grown far beyond the reaches of even its original inventor, and few believe that this effort will have much of an impact. Or we’ve been hit with so many new “initiatives” that all we care about now is what’s working, what’s broke, and trying to ensure pieces of the former do not become part of the latter.

Categories
Internet

State of Video

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

A lot seems to be going on in the world of online video.

NBC and its affiliates have returned to iTunes, and brought quasi-HD quality with it. Welcome back to Eureka and Heroes, and in a much better quality than previous TV shows. ABC has also started rolling out shows in HD quality.

The move was paired with the release of iTunes 8, which hasn’t necessarily been a smooth upgrade when paired with the AppleTV. The syncing between iTunes and AppleTV has generated some problems, and you can only purchase HD TV shows on iTunes—they’re not available directly on the AppleTV.

Joost is now web-based rather than requiring a separate player. I’m trying it now, and the quality isn’t too bad; about what you would find with Hulu and other lower resolution videos. No HD-like quality yet, but hopefully in time.

The streaming is a little rough, but that could also be a problem along the pipe. One advantage Joost has over so many other online video services is that it provides content for people in most countries, not just the UK, or the US. Of course, we all don’t see the same content.

Still nothing yet from Roku as to when we can expect the additional content for the Roku player.

In the meantime, the first town to go all digital, Wilmington, North Caroline, has not imploded yet from the change, so there’s hope for the rest of the world. The local news stations I pick up using an HD tuner have started to man phone lines during news broadcasts in order to answer questions about the conversion. It’s still going to be interesting times when the switch is turned on.

Categories
Browsers HTML5

OMG! Web Developer has to wait! The Horror!

Where I focused on Ian Hickson’s statement about extensibility, every other person, and their brothers, sisters, and aunts are throwing a hissy because of the HTML5 timeline.

Scott Gilbertson writes:

Even if your 2022 ronc-o-matic web-enabled toaster (It slices! It dices! It browses! It arouses!) does ship with Firefox v22.3, will HTML still be the dominant language of web? Given that no one can really answer that question, does it make sense to propose a standard so far in the future?

Jeff Croft writes:

I’m not saying the specs should go away. They absolute serve a purpose. I’m just saying that I personally am done paying much attention to them. Instead, I’m reading blogs like Surfin’ Safari and Mozilla Developer News to find out what the new shiny is in browsers, because these are the things I can actually take advantage of in serving my clients and users.

 

And?

So?

Specification work was never focused on the end users, it’s focused at the user agents or others who have to implement the specifications. The Mozillas, Apples, Operas, Microsoft, et al. The only reason I pay attention to any of it is because of my concern about extensibility.

In the meantime, the new stuff that is HTML5 is leaking into browsers now, not years from now. That’s part of the specification process—actual implementation on the street in order to “proof the spec”, as it were. And pieces of HTML5 are not just showing up in Firefox, Opera, and Safari/WebKit— IE8 has a few HTML5 tricks up its sleeve.

Heck, HTML5 isn’t the only longish spec under development. CSS 2 started in 1998, the lost call for CSS 2.1 was in 2002, the candidate recommendation was in 2007, and Microsoft is only now providing CSS 2.1 support. That’s ten years, end to end.

In the meantime, I’m using CSS3 stuff that’s only supported by a couple of browsers, and the final release of all the CSS3 bits is probably years out, too. Of course, I only play around with my own spaces—professional web designers and developers know that we can’t necessarily use the shiny new stuff for client applications, because we’re still having to support browsers that are seven years old.

Hey! We’re still supporting browsers almost as old as the timeline when HTML5 will be finalized! I guess things aren’t as “today” and “now” as we think they are.

The point is, specifications take time, or at least, good specifications typically take time. Any doofus can toss a quick spec out and call it done, but who wants to use the doofus spec?

That schedule part of what Ian had to say didn’t phase me. As far as I’m concerned, the group can take as long as it needs. In the meantime, I’ll play around with the local storage, and some of the other odds and ends, as I keep putting in my annoying “But what about SVG?” “But what about RDF?” oar; probably helping to slow the development of the spec, even more.