MPEGLA Announces H.264 To Remain Royalty-Free (For Free Content) Until 2016
This is a good thing, for now, but licensing-wise H.264 is actually probably worse than Flash. It works great with a hardware decoder, but why should I trust the MPEGLA to not pull the rug out from under the internet in 6 years? Of note: The 2016 deadline only applies to “Internet Video that is Free to End Users.” Who gets to define “free?”
The press release should’ve been subtitled “Your Move, Adobe.”
A Form of Madness
The latest addition to Mark Pilgrim’s quickly-becoming-essential “Dive Into HTML5” series is about forms, and it is (as one might expect) the most cogent description of HTML5’s new form attributes and types that I’ve seen so far.
Dive Into HTML5: Video
Mark Pilgrim dives in to HTML5 video, and swims around. This is essential reading for web developers.
Misunderstanding markup
Jeremy Keith explains some of the problems of perception in the recent XHTML2/HTML5 showdown. If you’ve been confused thus-far, let this be your panacea.
W3C Abandoning XHTML 2, Focusing on HTML5
This is giant news for anyone who makes websites. See also: W3C’s FAQ for the situation.
Ian Hickson on Codecs for
Mozilla won’t support H.264, Apple won’t support Ogg, Google will support both, and Microsoft won’t say. Doubt this will change anytime soon, which really makes me sad.
Closing Tabs 5/27/09
Super Mario 64 longplay, grabbing all 120 stars. If you were under the age of 30 when this came out, goodbye afternoon. It’s such an astoundingly well put together game. At every stage, care was taken to make sure it “felt” right. Jason Scott’s talk about Platform Studies has me rekindling my love affair with it.
The Metroid Prime entry on Wikitroid. ’nuff said. Exploring the 3D transition of one of Nintendo’s other major franchises, which skipped the N64 and went straight to the GameCube. With Mario 64, everyone expected it to be mind-blowing. With Prime, everyone expected it to be shit. Sometimes everyone is wrong. Disclosure: I have stock options in Wikia.
ANTHEM Platform. A platform for piping Social Networks, IM, email, OEMs, etc, to cell phone applications. Recently acquired by Good Technology.
Imified. A service which runs IM bots for you, and acts as a go-between for you and the IM network. You can code up applications that the bot queries with what is said to it, by whom. They provide examples in PHP, which makes me happy.
Google is “betting big on HTML5″. Speed of web development accelerating,
canvas,video, client-side databases, web workers, etc. See also: YouTube using the HTML5videotag.Sleeping with the NME: how the British music press picked up a dose of the crap, which is about the sorry state of the British music press. From Velvet Coalmine, which has become a favorite blog of mine.
Remote-controlled sperm, or more precisely: remote-controller sperm-like nanodevices.
CSS-only gradients using CSS3 and no images. Whatsoever. Uses the
-webkit-gradientproperty. Hot shit.
Dave Shea on Why He’s Backing HTML5
The points he makes are good ones, and I agree with most of them. The comments are pretty lively on this one, but seem civilized.
Sam Ruby on Rev Canonical
The short list of grievances: Twitter doesn’t support it, and may never. HTML5 omits rev entirely. Atom uses the self attribute for the very purposes that rev="canonical" might be used for.