Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Next flashplayer ships with speex audio codec

See the release notes. Speex is one of the best codecs for VoIP, and it is patent-free and open source. Related to this is also a new UDP-based network protocol called RTMFP for faster realtime media and P2P-capable, which will be part of flashplayer 10, now let's hope Adobe will release this protocol as part of their open specification initiative, but I guess they will try to keep RTMFP proprietary (at least until it gets reverse engineered), so they can sell their overpriced Media streaming servers.

Google JS library released

As part of Google's effort to better document the open web, they released today some of their Javascript libraries. I browsed a bit through the code, it is well documented and one thing grabbed my attention: the code structure looks similar to dojo, e.g. below a snippet from their DOM lib with ''provide" and "require" statements:
goog.provide('goog.dom');
goog.provide('goog.dom.DomHelper');
goog.provide('goog.dom.NodeType');

goog.require('goog.array');
goog.require('goog.math.Coordinate');
goog.require('goog.math.Size');
goog.require('goog.object');
goog.require('goog.string');
goog.require('goog.userAgent');
...

XHTML or HTML

I never really understood why people were using XHTML and I usually tried to clarify by pointing to articles by respected Web experts (e.g.: Ian Hickson, Brad Neuberg).
Today I read this and collected some more links about use and misuse of XHTML: