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Showing posts from February, 2010

A specification to specify specifications within specifications

Anyone who has worked in a project involving writing some software would have come across specifications of some kind - those holy documents written by the project elite that are a pain both to implement as well as to maintain and serve nothing more than as a hurdle to getting to a working product. Often spec documents either derive from another or many such documents build, by way of cross-reference, a connected specification which soon creates a need for another document to describe the relationship between these docs... which, of course, has to be kept up-to-date not only whenever any specification is updated but also when there are relationship updates or when new nodes come up etc. Soon anyone entering the project has to pass through this wall made of the interconnected web of specs only to understand soon enough that the product he/she is working on is quite different from what the specifications are dreaming about. Often times, to the authors the specs are sacrosanct and reality

Will the world's largest video site switch over to open media formats ?

With Google's acquisition of ON2 approved by ON2 stakeholders, there is an opportunity for the owner of the largest video website YouTube to unencumber the entire collection of patented codecs. Codecs are a commodity and with HTML5 this is the right time to push for the standard video format on the web to be an open one. This is in keeping with the spirit of the web and provides the springboard (along with other innovations like ubiquitous broadband connectivity and media-rich apps & services) for the web to expand into the multimedia dimension. The FSF is quick to realize this and has issued an open letter to google asking them to free VP8 and make it default format on Youtube. I am very interested to see Google's reaction to this. I hope for the best ! Good luck, fsf ! Good luck, people !