Code Away

I was wondering why Mozilla refuses to support H.264 streaming video format while Chrome and Safari don’t seem to mind it, but Christopher Blizzard and Robert O’Callahan both make compelling arguments in favor of Ogg Theora codec (or rather, against all codecs which are patent-protected and can potentially charge licensing fees).

Both posts argued well against H264. Particularly Christopher Blizzard, who drew a fine analogy with GIF. The scary part is that both of them feel the “fallback” on Flash (from HTML5) is good since it ensures that users have minimum problems. Well, this is quite a surprise (as many point out in the posts’ comments) for someone advocating use of open standards.

Adobe, on the other hand, will definitely extract mileage out of the situation to stress the fact that Flash is the true technology for cross-browser support, be it video or generic rich applications. Nothing wrong with that, they need to fight the battle with everyone hailing HTML5 as a flash-killer.

A crazy battle with 3 sides (3 and a half actually- We forgot Silverlight and IE!) and the end user confused. Welcome to the web.

I had no idea this can be done. Very nicely written article by Jonathan Snook on using css attributes to rotate text on a webpage.

Hell lot of browser quirks, almost zero consistency across different browsers and different operating systems, but I am not complaining. Most of the newer attributes like opacity started off as browser-specific.

Hope to find this more consistent a year later. After all, we shouldn’t be forced to use images just to display text in a different orientation, right?

Read this if you value your privacy. It’s a good walk through even if you are not an expert with computers.