Reading List
In amongst all the festive rancour, there were a few interesting sites I saw in the last week or so.
- Notes on Designing Websites for the Asian Market by Yours Truly.
- MPEG-DASH is the first International Standard for dynamic adaptive streaming of multimedia content over HTTP. It will be interesting to see what the royalty/ licensing situation will be.
- I don’t agree with everything Faruk says in The Threat Against the Web, but wholeheartedly applaud “The web will only thrive as long as the web is not owned by any one entity; not owned, not controlled, and not defined”.
- On the subject of the constantly-embattled Open Web, Google offered patches to allow their super-whizzo! invented-in-secret Dart language to be in WebKit. Oliver Hunt of Apple objected: “As the 90s demonstrated such “features” are bad for developers, and bad for the open web. This may not be apparent to people who have not spent years working in the environment but random additions frequently cause significant pain down the road” and adding adding “it fragments the web” and risks “turn[ing] webkit into the engine that everyone hates because of all its unique “features” that break the open web, a la certain browsers in the late 90s”.
- W3C: Open Web Platform Weekly Summary – 2011-12-05 – 2011-12-11 (worth an RSS subscription)
- Shapecatcher lets you draw a shape and tries to match it to any of 10,877 unicode characters.
- Still life: Bent objects – The secret life of everyday things