I’ve been searching for a complete EBNF for XML 1.1 without much success. I found one for XML 1.0, but I was hoping to avoid manually patching it for the XML 1.1 changes.
In the end, I decided that it would be easiest to just parse the EBNF directly out of the specification. Here it is, for reference:
I was surprised a few days ago with a new layout for Google News on one of the machines I use. I haven’t seen it reported anywhere yet. I came across it tonight while testing and grabbed a few screen captures in case it disappears.
The biggest change is that each story now has a bordered box around it and the stars introduced recently have been moved to the right-hand side of the story. Each story has a drop-down menu associated with it, but the only option in there is “Email”. This drop-down has the class “share-icons” - possibly a new location for a “share in reader/buzz” option.
Looking through the DOM, it appears that this is called the new “blended” story style.
Here’s a couple of screenshots:
There’s a comparison that I was pointed at today showing the difference between a number of different modern encoders. The Theora 1.1 demo on that page looked particularly bad, so I decided to investigate.
I downloaded and compiled the latest versions of libogg, libvorbis and libtheora from xiph.org. I ran the encoder example (as the other test did), but discovered that it does support two-pass encoding, contrary to what was stated on the other test’s page. I ran a few different two-pass encodes (including one with soft rates), but didn’t get a lot of variability between results. Overall, however, my newly re-encoded version is significantly better than the one on the other page.
It appears that the Theora 1.1 version is at least as good as the XviD encoding, but at a smaller bitrate. It’s not as crisp as x264, but I’m not sure I’d notice the difference.
Source (via saintdevelopment):
Theora 1.1 (2939kbps):
./encoder_example -o touhou.theora.ogg --two-pass -V 2931 stream.y4m
XviD (3127kbps,via saintdevelopment):
x264 (2951kbps, via saintdevelopment):
Just so it’s clear: all of the results on this page with the exception of the Theora 1.1.1 screenshot, are taken from Saint Development’s codec comparison. The images in the comparison are from frame 700 in the final video (extracted in PNG format using mplayer as described by the test).
IE6 has been getting a bad rap lately. France and Germany are both warning their citizens not to use it. The recent intrusions at Google were purported to be caused by holes in IE6. Even Microsoft is warning users to steer clear of it.
To get an idea of who’s given up on testing against this ancient browser, I’ve been running around browsing with IE6 in a VM. From what I’ve seen so far, it’s not getting a lot of love.
I’m pretty happy about this: as more and more sites break in IE6, it drives more people to browsers that don’t suck like Chrome or Firefox. It’s the last part of the browser death spiral: completely busted on the new and exciting sites.
The web browsing experience is pretty poor overall. Many sites serve transparent PNG files to the browser, which often render with miscolored backgrounds. Elements gain random padding, throwing nicely formatted designs for a loop. Other elements that are shrink-wrapped in other browsers sometimes end up with extremely large widths.
Note: I tried not to test sites too deeply- I figured that deeply nested screens will occasionally break in modern browsers too.
Facebook is the first site I visited. I figured that this would be the site most likely to regularly test against IE6. It’s clear that they do some testing: the interface works reasonably well overall, with only a few small glitches that might annoy a user.
The most glaring issue happens when you click the “more” link on the left. The UI gets kicked down to the bottom of the screen. Looks like a classic IE float bug:
The setting popup menu occasionally gets itself into a state where it pops as you mouseover the popup part of it, becoming entirely useless (it also random gains padding from time to time):
Twitter’s site is pretty simple, but it’s obviously not been tested in IE6. The CSS image sprites they use as controls on each tweet are totally busted:
Google reader is a rich application and works reasonably well in IE6. Lots of little formatting issues: buttons that are cut off, icons that float in the wrong place, stuff pushed down a line. Overall, still usable, albeit slow:
FriendFeed’s audience is probably not using IE6 and I imagine that they don’t put a lot of work into testing it. Many of the sidebar links don’t work and it sends transparent PNGs to IE6, which happily poops all over them:
An up-and-coming Twitter client, Brizzly looks pretty stellar in modern browsers. The front page is a bit mangled in IE6, however:
When you try to log in, it’s pretty obvious that IE6 isn’t in their plans:
There’s a pretty big part of the web that still works in IE6, but a lot of the popular sites are getting pretty buggy in IE6. If your startup decides that it’s not worth supporting IE6, I wouldn’t blame you. IE6 is rockin’ a 13% market share on StatCounter and it’ll likely drop down to 4-5% by the end of next year.
Is it worth all the trouble to support IE6 for me? It depends. I’m not going to worry about fixing every little visual glitch in IE6. I’ll probably start sending down transparent PNGs to everything, even if the images don’t look great in IE6. If some bit of functionality breaks in IE6, I’ll repair it to the point where it works well enough to get the job done.
Full support for IE6? No thanks.
It looks like the Chrome team has finally re-enabled extensions on Mac again (hat-tip to MG Siegler) in the latest dev channel build. You can’t update from the “About Google Chrome” screen yet, but you can grab the latest build and install it directly.
Even better, they are now allowing Mac users to install extensions directly from extension pages (warning: shameless self-promotion link).
Extensions are working well. They’ve turned on the browser action menus, so the various extensions that I’ve installed all work properly.
Bookmark sync is enabled as well, but I haven’t seen where the bookmarks are supposed to show up in Google Docs.
I’ve really missed having extensions for this last month; getting them back made my day!
