simonb.com: blog > articles tagged with standards

Good documentary on the absurd state of software patents and its impact on new business and therefore growth.

Further reading:

• Math You Can't Use
• Patent Failure

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Nice cup of tea and a biscuit? There's a standard for that. British Standard 6008 available from the BSI for a mere GBP 32 or for free on Scribd and from this Hacker News thread. But wait, British standards are not enough. It is also an International Standard - ISO 3103. It turns out ISO have a whole range of tea related standards. Good to see our taxes being put to good use.

Little it known of this reclusive standard. In 1999 BS 6008 won the Ig Noble prize for literature and made a brief public appearance. Since…

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Last night, at my local DVD store, I purchased a Blu-ray disc for RMB 80 (USD 12). The same disc on Amazon costs USD 17.50 (down from USD 35). It is safe to assume, just like every other title in the shop, it is a fake. When Blu-ray was introduced there was doubt as to its viability due to the rise of Internet delivery and competition from HD-DVD. But the appearance of fake discs means Blu-ray has arrived as a standard. It must be viable because there is a big enough market for pirates to be shipping discs. Therefore, I…

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Robin: Flash is not on the iPad
Batman: You fool!

Made with the Batman Comic Generator

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Adobe have posted a blog "explaining" why Flash can not be made open source:

"The main reason we can't release Flash Player as open source is because there is technology in the Player that we don't own, such as the industry standard hi-def video codec, H.264."

This is, of course, complete BS. Have they never heard of libraries? Just release the bits you can and let the open source world plug the video decoder hole with ffmpeg. Perhaps the real reason is that, these days, most of the use for Flash on the web is nothing more than a…

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You need to be using an up to date versions of either Firefox, Safari or Chrome to view the above video.

Ah, those five minute tasks that end up taking the whole day... So, the kids got the above wind-up, light-up, musical toy for Christmas. Perfect for a little Christmas Day video I thought. And while I'm at it, lets make it with HTML5 video tags. That should be quick and easy... Here's what I discovered.

Dive Into HTML5 is a good resource

Firefox does not support MP4 files because of licensing issues. Safari/Chrome does not support OGG because…

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When developing web sites, one of the things we often have to do is put fixes in the code to work around bugs in Internet Explorer. This is getting better with IE8 and IE7 but IE6 still has a large market share and it's the worst damn browser in the world for standards compliance®. Typically we make a lovely site, then test in IE6, bang head on desk, fix, test and repeat. Oh the joy. But all of this is nothing, nothing I tell you, compared to the travesty that is the HTML rendering in Outlook 2007. When…

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Dear Web Developer,

location != language

Location is not language.

There is a field in the HTTP Request header called Accept-Language. Use it.

Oh, and also, if you have a language selection button: put the text in the destination language or mulitple languages NOT the just current one, so those who can't read the current language might have some clue about what it's for! Jeez!

(Written after yet another web site forced a language on me based on my location.)

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IE6 is the bane of web developers everywhere. Greatly illustrated as the drunk-loser-relative in the above image from John Martz. Flickr has a larger version. There is hope on the horizon: MS is installing IE8 by default via Windoze Update. So the worst should be behind us in browser land at least. Email clients are another story.

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In response to my comments on the CER EVD article there’s a new post on the CER IT blog and a corresponding one on Gareth’s personal site in which he defends the original post. Good for him. He also misinterprets what I wrote. In the spirit of a blogging conversation I respond below.

First, let me define what I mean when I say success in relation to disc formats: a disc format is a success if content providers are making lots of content and consumers are buying lots of discs. For example, CD, DVD, PS2, XBox etc. By…

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