Tag Archives: html

Flip The Game

I decided to reverse the order of the machines on the main FATE page. That makes the Linux and Mac OS X machines float to the top. Sorry, BSD and Solaris people, but the Linux stuff just take precedence.

And speaking of Solaris, you will notice that we have a new configuration: Solaris 10 on Sparc, compiling with gcc, with more compiler configurations hopefully to come. Thanks to JeffD for contributing these results.

Back on the topic of the front page: Of course, I have every desire to update the entire web experience. But I’m still woefully inept at modern web development. Maybe I’m being too hard on myself. Perhaps it’s better to claim that I have so many higher priority problems to solve for FATE. I have an entire other rant in process for my experience with trying to understand modern web programming.

Look, I have all this raw data in a neat format. What is a good, quick, cross-browser method to display it in a friendly manner so that it can be easily sorted by various criteria. In different GUI APIs, I’m pretty sure that I would coerce the data into some kind of DataGrid object. There’s nothing quite like that in plain HTML. Javascript, perhaps? What’s out there? Where do I even start looking?

Researching The HTML 5 Video Tag

Discussions of the proposed <video> tag in HTML5 invariably make my ears perk up, maybe because it could be perceived — under the right circumstances — as alleged competition against what I do at my day job. But I’m still interested in all topics concerning multimedia technology, and this sounds like a big one. Plus, Mozilla recently announced that it would donate 100 grand to Wikimedia to help improve Ogg and Theora.


100 Grand candy bar

Quick glossary/refresher on key terminology: Vorbis = audio codec; Theora = video codec; Ogg = container format that wraps and delivers Vorbis, Theora and several other types of media.

So, the video tag is supposed to be the promised land of video on the web (just like SVG is supposed to be the open answer to Flash). I’m looking at this from a purely pragmatic perspective. Here are 2 big questions about media meant for delivery via the media tag:

  1. How do people create the media?
  2. How do people consume the media?

I want to ponder these questions. Continue reading →