Rob Sayre’s Mozilla Blog

Maciej Stachowiak, Apple: “I’m surprised at the level of confidence expressed in Theora not infringing unknown patents…”

That’s right folks, it’s working group amateur hour. Step right up, try your hand.

Anne van Kesteren: “Opera has announced support for Ogg Theora and Vorbis“

That’s right, the WHATWG accepts secret feedback.

But… I thought secrets were bad.

Something must have changed. Secrets seem to be OK now. What am I missing?

This just in…

<othermaciej> sayrer: the normal definition of “open stanard” doesn’t automatically imply royalty-free licensing
<jcranmer> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_standard disagrees
<jcranmer> “The term “open” is usually restricted to royalty-free technologies”
<jcranmer> (2nd para)
<sayrer> but that was written by hippies, obviously
<jcranmer> “The definitions of the term “open standard” used by academics, the European Union and some of its member governments or parliaments such as Denmark, France, and Spain preclude open standards requiring fees for use, as do the New Zealand and the Venezuelan governments.”
<sayrer> othermaciej: how about this: proprietary is where you pay
<othermaciej> wikipedia seems to disagree with actual standards orgs (as stated in later paragraphs)

That’s right folks, standards orgs producing patent-encumbered standards claim their standards are open. Clearly, a fair and balanced approach is called for.

Maciej Stachowiak: “I believe the wide availability of H.264 hardware is in part because H.264 was developed through an open standards process that included the relevant stakeholders.”

Wikipedia: “Microsoft SQL Server Compact (SQL CE) is a compact relational database produced by Microsoft for applications that run on mobile devices and desktops.”

Steve Souders: CSS Sprites are a way to make your web pages faster. A sprite combines multiple background images into a single image. This reduces the number of downloads in the page. Most major websites use sprites, but they’re a pain in the neck!

Sprites have the advantage of working right now, but maybe there should be a way to serve up a multipart response with your sprite images as well. That would cut down on CSS rule count and maintenance, but still group the images in one HTTP request. Authors are already giving up the advantages of separate resources in return for speed, so maybe this is worth doing.

You can (in theory… haha) get some of these advantages with HTTP pipelining, but a multipart response would allow the server optimize the response order as they do with sprites today.

Update: more from vlad

Mark is going try working on Vanilla full time. Mmmm, beans.

Julian Seward has joined Mozilla. Julian is the original author of Valgrind and bzip2. He’s also worked on the Glasgow Haskell Compiler and at ARM Ltd.

Initially, he’ll be focusing on the nanojit component we share with Adobe. Here’s a start.

Steve Yegge: “Shit is NOT easy. Remember that. Shit is NOT easy. If you think it’s easy, then you are being naïve. You are being a future VP. Don’t be that way.”

There are lots of obsolete laws on the books.