Robert Accettura's Fun With Wordage » ie

Microsoft Joins W3C SVG Working Group

Robert — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 02:29:24 +0000

Microsoft is joining the W3C SVG Working Group. Presumably that means there’s some interest in SVG for IE or Silverlight or both. I wonder what led to the change of heart.

I pretty much wrote off any chance of SVG being mainstream in 2005 when Adobe bought Macromedia. Adobe was previously somewhat of a SVG pusher, but Macromedia obviously is the home of Flash. As expected the SVG love dried up. The gap that Adobe filled was adding support for SVG to IE. If IE supports it natively that’s a game changer.

Gecko already has decent support for SVG. WebKit has support for a while. Opera has support as well. Without analyzing in too much detail there should be a subset that’s usable across current browsers and hopefully IE by the time IE 9.0 ships.

I must admit given the choice I’m still more interested in Microsoft supporting , but no word on that as of yet. I’m still hopeful.

Hooray for web standards!

Adventures With document.documentElement.firstChild

Robert — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 20:59:12 +0000

Here’s an interesting DOM test-case I ran across inadvertently yesterday.

For the purpose of this post assume the following markup:


< !DOCTYPE html>



	
	Testcase


Something

If I use document.documentElement.firstChild I don’t get consistent behavior. In Firefox and IE I get the element, which is what I was initially expecting. In WebKit (Safari/Chrome) and Opera. I get the HTML comment which I wasn’t.

I think WebKit and Opera are technically correct on this as the DOM Level 2 specs state:

firstChild of type Node, read only

The first child of this node. If there is no such node, this
returns null.

A COMMENT_NODE is a node and therefore should have been first. As for the position of the comment, the document is valid HTML5 and also is valid as XHTML 1.0 Strict and HTML 4 Strict. My interpretation is that this means indeed the comment is the first valid node in the documentElement.

One of the reasons why I even thought to use document.documentElement.firstChild is that I saw Google doing it the other day for the new asynchronous tracking code for Google Analytics (currently in beta). Originally the code was:

  var _gaq = _gaq || [];
  _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXX-X']);
  _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

  (function() {
    var ga = document.createElement('script');
    ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' :
        'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';
    ga.setAttribute('async', 'true');
    document.documentElement.firstChild.appendChild(ga);
  })();

It has now been updated to prevent this problem. I don’t know if I was the first to report it or if it was already known by the Google engineers. The code, still in beta is now:

  var _gaq = _gaq || [];
  _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXX-X']);
  _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

  (function() {
    var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true;
    ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';
    (document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0] || document.getElementsByTagName('body')[0]).appendChild(ga);
  })();

The new code seems a bit more resilient. They also got rid of the longhand ga.setAttribute in favor of just ga.async and added the type attribute.

There is a test case for anyone who wants to try it. I haven’t found a relevant Mozilla bug.

Debating Ogg Theora and H.264

Robert — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 02:40:42 +0000

Since the big HTML 5 news that there will be no defined codec for or there has been a lot of discussion about the merits of such a decision, and what led to it. To quote Ian Hickson’s email:

Apple refuses to implement Ogg Theora in Quicktime by default (as used by Safari), citing lack of hardware support and an uncertain patent landscape.

Google has implemented H.264 and Ogg Theora in Chrome, but cannot provide the H.264 codec license to third-party distributors of Chromium, and have indicated a belief that Ogg Theora’s quality-per-bit is not yet suitable for the volume handled by YouTube.

Opera refuses to implement H.264, citing the obscene cost of the relevant patent licenses.

Mozilla refuses to implement H.264, as they would not be able to obtain a license that covers their downstream distributors.

Microsoft has not commented on their intent to support at all.

I think everyone agrees this is going nowhere and isn’t likely to change in the near future. For the sake of moving HTML5 forward, this is likely the best decision.

Here’s how I interpret everyone’s position:

Apple’s Argument

One of the undeniable perks behind H.264 right now is that there is hardware decoding available and used on on certain devices. One of the most notable is the iPhone. Using hardware decoding means your not using the CPU which results in better performance, and most importantly better battery life.

Thus far there’s no hardware Theora decoder on the market (if you know of any let me know, my research says none), which I suspect is why Apple is hesitant to jump on board. Until there’s hardware that’s proven to perform well, be cost-effective in the quantities Apple needs, and not be bombarded with patent infringement claims, I suspect they’d rather settle with H.264. The patent part is critical. Apple can update software to comply with patent wars pretty quickly, as many other companies have done with software in the past. Hardware is not so easy. Last minute hardware changes are harder to deal with than software because of the many things it impacts, and the inability to update at a later date.

I’m almost positive the lack of hardware support is the exact same reason Apple has been so against Flash support. Remember the YouTube application isn’t using VP6 like regular flash, it’s using H.264 (that’s why it took so long for all of YouTube to be available on the iPhone).

If there’s enough Theora content out there, there will likely be Theora decoder hardware made to meet market demand. To get to this point will be difficult with the amount of VP6 (Flash) and H.264 content already on the web. H.264 alone has a major head start in applications. VP6 has several years of video on the web now (and I still don’t think it has a hardware decoder on the market though that might be due to licensing again).

In the long run, I think mobile technology will improve enough to make this a somewhat unnecessary constraint. Mobile CPU’s and GPU’s are just starting to get to the caliber needed for video. Performance per watt should improve. Battery technology is just starting to get pushed to the limits. This is a good thing for Theora in the long run, but the question is how long?

Until it can be played with minimal impact on battery life, I don’t think any company who has a heavy investment in mobile will want to jump on board.

Google’s Argument

Google has money and can license H.264. Shocker. Google however has trouble when it comes to Chromium. I suspect Google doesn’t care too much about which way this goes since what they support in Chrome doesn’t mandate that YouTube support it. However if the encoding quality for a given bitrate is good enough, it becomes a viable option.

Regarding the quality argument, I’ll simply point to this comparison. I the quality today is comparable already, and likely to get better as the encoders improve. I’ll leave this discussion here.

Opera’s Argument

Opera says H.264 is to expensive to license. I don’t know what the costs are, and what they would be for Opera, but I’ll take their word on it. After all, the do have a product available for free download. While commercial and closed source, they don’t have Google’s revenue stream and I respect that.

Mozilla’s Argument

Mozilla can’t license for downstream Gecko use etc. I’m sure a good part of the argument is also that requiring licensing fees to use is bad for the web and open source. I agree.

Microsoft’s Argument

No comment. Historically they implemented but not the . Make of that what you will. could be supported by plugin if needed. I recall Adobe supporting SVG by plugin a few years ago. Where to go from here? I think there are a few possible outcomes. As for what I think are the most likely: There’s a push for hardware decoding that makes Theora on mobile technically possible and working well. If Apple legally is satisfied and jumps on board that changes the game. As I stated earlier I think Google is mostly ambivalent since they support both right now. Opera doesn’t want H.264 anyway, so they are cool. IE 8 can likely be handled by a plugin. Apple really is the deciding factor. Theora is the future. See what the web does. I suspect at least for a long while the web will just stick with Flash since it works on almost all desktops. For mobile the iPhone and Android make up pretty much the bulk of the mobile video market and that doesn’t look like it’s changing so fast. Content providers that want mobile will encode for mobile. That means 3 target platforms, not ideal but reasonable. H.264 and whatever Adobe adopts is the future. I know how the media is interpreting all of this. How do other developers, and open source folks see it? Microsoft Cutting Back On IE? Robert — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 01:54:09 +0000 Asa pointed out an interesting CNBC piece regarding cutbacks in what looks like contractors on the IE team: One of the units already seeing cutbacks is Microsoft’s sagging browser business. A report in the Seattle Times says 180 contract workers were told last month that their services would not be renewed. Just yesterday, researcher Net Applications reported that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser registered 68 percent market share in December, down from 74 percent in May. If this is true, and I think it is likely as CNBC is a rather reputable source of business news, I predict Trident’s days are numbered. As I pointed out back in November, Balmer suggested they might look at WebKit. I should note I do not think this will have any impact on IE 8, which is nearly complete. They could of course choose Gecko which would save them from needing to work with Google and Apple (which might freak out some government regulators). The other very real option is to either license Opera’s Presto engine, or simply buy Opera which would give them some strength in the mobile market. I think Microsoft would prefer to buy simply because of the mobile implications. Opera has a decent foothold in the mobile market. They would still have the expense of developing a rendering engine but instead of playing catch up they would be much more “ready to play”. This would save them the overhead expenses of trying to cram several years of development to simply catch up to the other browsers. Since Presto is proprietary they still can utilize their other proprietary technologies without leaking any code to the open source community. As I said in the past, keeping things proprietary is important to Microsoft’s web strategy. Poor standards compliant, performance, bugs lingering for years, security issues, are all issues that have plagued this rendering engine. The final nail in the coffin might end up being a recession and the need to cut costs. Of course it’s possible Microsoft may not be renewing these contractors since IE 8 is nearly done and it will simply slow down IE 9 development, but I don’t think it’s likely considering the speed the competitors are going. I don’t think Microsoft will fall asleep at the wheel a second time. So I’d like to adjust my statements back in November regarding Microsoft’s use of WebKit. I said before that it was unlikely. If this news is true, I think it’s becomes very realistic they will drop Trident. Maybe it really is as busted internally as we’ve all suspected for years. There will still be fierce competition between WebKit, Gecko, and Presto regardless of what happens. Innovation and competition are essential to a healthy internet. This in fact makes it much more competitive since the one in last place in terms of supporting the latest in standards would suddenly catch up overnight. Enough speculation for now. Lets see what turns out to be fact, and what turns out to be CompSci Fiction. Edit [1/3/2009 @ 9:40 PM EST]:: Via Asa, apparently the layoffs were actually the MSN Homepages team, not the IE team as CNBC suggested. Google Gears For Safari And Other Browser Addons Robert — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 02:07:00 +0000 Google today released a beta of Google Gears for Safari. Still no iPhone support, but that’s not likely due to Apple’s rather restrictive licensing rather than technical reasons. It’s good to see them keeping true to their original efforts to support all platforms equally. That’s been a gripe of mine recently. With Google creating Gears for all browsers, Apple creating QuickTime on all browsers, Mozilla creating support for IE, Microsoft creating Silverlight and Windows Media Player for all browsers (though Mac users are through Flip4Mac) it creates an interesting web of technologies. Everyone is starting to fill holes on other platforms. The downside to this is that users need to download multiple components for a good web experience. That is still a major concern for the future of the web. It’s not all about licensing. Rebreaking The Web Robert — Fri, 30 May 2008 02:10:33 +0000 It’s happening again. Once upon a time, browser vendors started adding their own features without consulting with each other and agreeing upon standards. What they created was a giant mess of inconsistencies across browsers and platforms that is still in effect today. Ask any web developer and they can tell you of the pains that they have suffered trying to make seemingly trivial things work everywhere consistently. It’s no easy task. Before IE 7, even an ajax required something along the lines of: var httpRequest; if (window.XMLHttpRequest) { // Mozilla, Safari, ... httpRequest = new XMLHttpRequest(); } else if (window.ActiveXObject) { // IE httpRequest = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP"); } That’s right, IE 6 didn’t support the native xmlHttpRequest object (more here). This is just one of many examples in JavaScript and CSS. document.all anyone? The end result of this problem became to be known as the “Web Standards” movement. Simply put it’s an idea that code should follow a standard that results in consistent output across all browsers on various platforms. Write once, run anywhere. While it’s taken years for this to manifest, it’s slowly become a reality. Firefox, Safari, Opera have fairly consistent rendering (at least in comparison to the mess of just a few years ago on the browser scene. IE 6 was fairly poor in terms of modern web development, but IE 7 made progress, and IE 8 is Microsoft’s greatest effort to date to bring their browser up to speed. Unfortunately, all that “progress” is really catch up and making specs from several years ago work across browsers as the biggest area of problems (CSS 2) become a recommendation in 1998. 10 years and a few days ago. Web sites, and developers want to do new things. As a result groups like WHATWG and HTML 5 formed with the intent to provide modern features such as 2D drawing (canvas), media playback, drag and drop, offline mode, and storage. All things desperately desired by web developers. Some of this stuff to date has been supplemented by the use of plugins such as Flash which can provide some of this functionality, in particular video. It should be noted the development of standards is a historically slow process since it’s essentially a bunch of geeks arguing until their keyboards wear out. This process takes a long time. To speed things up, some once again bypassed standards and instead decided to implement things on their own: Apple implemented Canvas, which has some notable concerns regarding intellectual property, though can still be standardized (and is still in the HTML5 specs as I’m typing this). Google released Gears which originally provided offline support for web browsers, but has since expanded to allow for better desktop integration and running javascript in the background on browsers it supports. Yahoo just announced BrowserPlus, which is an API “that allows developers to create rich web applications with desktop capabilities” (that’s verbatim from their page). Mozilla added to Firefox 3 Online/Offline events, Web-based protocol handling, which are both part of the WHATWG Web Application 1.0 specs. In addition, APNG and text extensions to Canvas were added, though it’s noted that they are experimental and essentially Firefox only for now. There are dozens of other little things in various browsers that are specific to them, but I won’t even go into that. These are just the more high profile things at this time. Does anyone else see the problem here? At the rate things are progressing, it’s going to be pretty tough to build a competitive and user-friendly web application without requiring at least one framework being installed on the client side. This means before a user can enjoy a good web experience they will need to install: Standards Compliant Web Browser (may come with OS) Latest version of Adobe Flash (essentially the video standard right now) BrowserPlus (for some sites) Google Gears (for some sites) This really is starting to feel like another browser-bubble, this one being more of a “browser feature bubble”. People rapidly trying to add features to meet application needs without standardizing. This time instead of building it all into the browser, they are also providing plugins to add the functionality. This is marginally better at best. While it allows for support on multiple browsers/platforms it restricts innovation since not all browsers/platforms are supported. Google Gears still doesn’t support the iPhone, despite it running in Safari due to Apple’s restrictions on 3rd party software. It also doesn’t run on all portable Linux devices, or Blackberry’s. Not to mention Opera or Camino. It works on other Mozilla browsers that support extensions provided you tell your users to follow these instructions (you can essentially call that “unsupported”). Yahoo’s BrowserPlus is no darling either. As of yet, it only supports Intel Mac’s running 10.4 or later (sorry PPC millions), and only Windows / Mac running Firefox 2+ or IE 7+. That leaves out millions of IE 6, Safari, and Opera users. Plus all of the mobile users (who are growing in number). Yahoo promises that will improve, but we’ve got to wait for Yahoo engineers to get around to that. If Yahoo is acquired by someone, who knows what that companies priorities will be for this project. Apple implemented Canvas in Safari, Mozilla implemented it in Firefox. But it’s adoption has been slow from a developer’s point of view since IE doesn’t support it. There are several libraries (including one by Google) that attempt to add support, but they are pretty slow and don’t provide the same experience to IE users (in particular older IE 6 users). APNG is supported in Firefox 3 and Opera 9.5, both not released just yet. APNG degrades nicely, but if your using an animation, you want an animation for all users, not just Firefox and Opera users. Yes, adoption can grow for canvas, Yahoo and Google can support more platforms and browsers, but that doesn’t fix the root problems here: The entire web is waiting on a company to update their enhancements to support a platform/browser. Open sourcing the code doesn’t really fix the problem since distribution is still problematic. Also just increases the chances of forking which makes it even more painful. Installing a browser in bits and pieces sucks. Users shouldn’t be subjected to that. There are multiple API’s to essentially do the same thing (drag & drop, offline support, video, etc.). Does anyone else see this new form of fragmenting to be problematic? While I agree the features each vendor is adding in are desired, I don’t think this is the right way to do it. One of a few things will happen here: After a period of time, one or more of these API’s will become deprecated as one becomes dominant. That’s a major pain for developers who choose the “wrong” one, and an expense for companies who are in that situation. Nobody wants to be in this situation. Things will continue to fragment and we’ll be back to the “Designed For Netscape” era, but it will be “Designed for Firefox 3+, Google Gears, Flash 9.0 r124, whatever”. I get a chill just thinking about it. Horrifically complicated code that essentially supports multiple products by using a subset of their functionality. This might be the “best” and it still sucks on a massive scale since it increases costs for development and decreases fun. You could use a JS library to abstract functionality to a more platform neutral API, but more libraries add overhead you may not want. Not to mention more code your relying on someone else for. None of these are a good outcome. I’m not saying that the standards route is perfect. There’s no binding requirement for anyone to adopt anything, or even accomplish a final spec. There are many half implemented specs, and many that never go anywhere. Perhaps that’s part of the problem. Perhaps it’s that standardization has historically been a closed process, though it’s slowly opening up (thanks WHATWG). Participation is also pretty touch as not many can manage to read all that email. Browser vendors are not without their faults either. They are historically a slow to fully adopt specs, and generally don’t collaborate on where they will start their implementation. Partial support is as good as no support unless a it’s adopted uniformly across all popular browsers. Perhaps that’s a place that browser vendors can best help developers. By simply agreeing to implement XY. That said, one could create a plugin that implements a standard. It’s already be done. Adobe released an SVG plugin (prior to the whole Macromedia deal as I’m not sure what the status is considering the Flash business is a closed source competitor), there’s also an XForms plugin for Mozilla browsers. I really hope some caution is used before we have a browser feature bubble. This is just going to become a mess of technologies that nobody can keep up with. A lot of progress has been made in the past few years to fix mistakes of the past. Is this process of add-ons really the right method of giving web developers what they want? To be fair, Google’s Aaron Boodman recently blogged regarding Google Gears and standards. And does indicate the desire to become become compatible with HTML5: Currently, the Gears Database and LocalServer modules are not fully compatible with the HTML5 proposals for the same functionality. This is only because those specs were written after Gears was released, and not because of any desire to be different. In fact, we were involved in the design of both HTML5 specs, and we are currently implementing the proposal for database access. This is good, but it’s still a moving target on a moving target as Google Gears is in beta and still being changed to match specs which are still evolving. To avoid any misconceptions, I do think these features are a good thing. I like canvas, offline support, drag & drop integration, and want to implement them myself as well. But I don’t think the process to add them has been successful thus far. I think it’s just asking for trouble later on and will take a long time to repair. This isn’t about Firefox extensions, or javascript libraries like jQuery, YUI or Prototype. I love them and use them every day. This is about having non standard ways to do things that clearly need to be standardized (and are in the process of being standardized), and encouraging other developers to implement a method that’s tied to a particular piece of software. Who is at fault here? Pretty much everyone. Standards bodies are to slow for a fast moving industry for starters. Secondly browser vendors fail to coordinate their progress on spec implementations. While nobody expects CSS 3 to be implemented overnight, of vendors would agree on milestones in which certain features would be implemented, that would greatly help implementation for web developers. Lastly plugin developers need to ensure what they are offering is widely available, free of any licensing problems that would impede implementation in other products, and are on a parallel track for standardization. The web wouldn’t have succeeded if you needed to install a plugin for a , or . Blocking Firefox Robert — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 02:19:58 +0000 There’s recently been a lot of buzz about a list of sites that make Firefox sad. Having written reporter, I’ve done a fair amount of monitoring in this area over the past few years. Overall I think the scope of sites that still block certain browsers/OS is declining. By scope I mean quantity of sites/popularity of sites. More and more often the sites are less and less popular sites. Often they are either financial institutions (known for being the last to update their tech) or media related (and dependent on Microsoft Windows Media DRM). That’s not to say the landscape doesn’t need to improve. From where I sit, it says the landscape is improving. More and more websites are realizing the need to work anywhere. No site is happy with a 5% drop in traffic. That means they can’t afford to ignore a browser with even more market share. Things are looking a little brighter. While it’s still not good for the web, Silverlight and Flash seem to encourage much more compatibility across browsers/platforms than Windows Media Player ever has. Flash has been a major win for Firefox. Flash is rather consistent across browsers making it a popular choice for media (think YouTube). It’s leveled the playing field, since lets face it, Windows Media historically has been lacking in Firefox, though recently improving. On Mac OS X it is awful at best. h.264 support will make Flash even more attractive to content providers in the near future who are still holding out because of quality. An interesting point made by that list is a lot of sites are “IE only” because of buggy navigation menu’s, typically due to flyout and drop down menu’s. It really is too bad. Most of those implementations aren’t even search engine friendly (they often store the entire navigation in a JS array). You’d think that would be incentive enough to change. So those are my somewhat random thoughts on the topic for the moment. On a sidenote, other content of the site includes a how to on Firefox pencils that look pretty cool. Firefox Tip: Import Later Robert — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 00:58:18 +0000 Were you someone who just wanted to try Firefox, and ended up keeping it? I know some people decided not to import their IE settings and since regret that because they had bookmarks they wanted to keep. Well don’t worry, you can still import them. Just go to the “File” menu and select “Import…” the wizard will guide you to importing your bookmarks/settings from your old browser into Firefox. It will take under a minute. IE Table Border Bug? Robert — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 03:16:26 +0000 I encountered this the other day. Firefox, Safari and Opera do what I expected and believe to be correct. I’m curious if anyone can explain this, or knows of a workaround that “doesn’t suck”. Take the following testcase: < !DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0//EN"> IE Table Border Bug Test Test Test Example Pay attention to the bottom border. Should be flush with the green cells. Firefox 2.0 Close Up: IE 6 Close Up: IE 7 Close Up: Strange, but interesting. Excuse the poor quality of the screenshots. I cut these up really quick. Perhaps this weekend I’ll do a nicer job. Walmart Blocks Other Browsers/Platforms Robert — Sat, 10 Feb 2007 21:54:05 +0000 Walmart Video Downloads blocks all browsers but IE on Windows. I tried it from Safari on Mac OS X 10.4 and still wasn’t able to get in (they wanted me to still download IE 6). As noted by TechCrunch, initially it looked like someone didn’t include the stylesheet correctly. Now it’s blocked with a formal error page. Initially it worked with a reload, now not at all. Spoofing the UserAgent let me in, and revealed only a small CSS goof with the header. Didn’t try a purchase since there’s nothing there I would really want. I guess this could be considered a feature: My browser prevents me from downloading You, Me, and Dupree. Apparently they use Windows Media Player for the DRM. I’d be surprised if it didn’t function properly in WMP when downloaded with Firefox. Thus far I haven’t seen any real difference between Windows Media Player 11 on IE and Firefox. It’s a great thing that Microsoft has drastically improved support. I’m surprised they didn’t just redirect to a more compatible store. There has been a fair amount of improvement in website compatibility with Firefox and Safari over the past 18 months. Unfortunately this isn’t an example of that.