Anne van Kesteren

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386: Internet Drafts are not Open Standards

John Gruber claims HTTP Live Streaming is an open standard because there is an internet draft hosted at the IETF. With help a dog could submit an internet draft to the IETF. There is no Working Group around this item and its intended status is “Informational” which is far away from “Standards Track.” After some amount of drafts one might reach RFC (with the intended status). However, technically not even RFC status qualifies as standard. While there are over five thousand RFCs, IETF currently has only seventy STD documents. And internet drafts intended to be “Informational” will of course never get there.

386: H264 still not free

This is a start of a new series of posts where I will attempt to correct the interwebs. You know, duty calls!

On August 26 MPEG LA announced in a rather cryptic message that usage of H264 that was already “free” until 2015 would now be “free forever.” Widespread misunderstanding ensued. Selected quotes below to get everyone back on track.

From Apple-Centric Observers Get the Facts Wrong: H.264 Still Ain’t Free:

Here’s the deal: today’s “free forever” MPEG LA announcement was mostly a PR coup. It changes very little: critics of the use of the patent-encumbered, royalty-bearing format in HTML5 video were aware that the free end user license might be extended.

But, boy was it a PR coup, because the words “forever free” starting spreading around the Web, and some people got the wrong idea. You’re not free to use MPEG LA’s technology as a content publisher if you want to use H.264 as your distribution format for on-demand or for-sale video. More importantly, you’re not free to ship H.264 encoders or decoders.

From free as in smokescreen: What MPEG-LA announced is that their current moratorium on charging fees for the transmission of H.264 content, previously extended through 2015 for uses that don’t charge users, is now permanent. You still have to pay for a license for H.264 if you want to make things that create it, consume it, or your business model for distributing it is direct rather than indirect.

Setting up Mercurial for W3C

The WebApps WG and HTML WG use dvcs.w3.org as Mercurial server for developing tests on, which are then (supposedly, at the moment there is a bug) put live on test.w3.org (and test2.w3.org). I forgot everything the second time I had to this so here are the settings:

• Store the following in ~/.hgrc:

  [ui]
  username = … <…@…>
  verbose = True
  
  [auth]
  w3c.prefix = dvcs.w3.org/hg/
  w3c.username = …
  w3c.password = …

• Use hg clone rather than hg pull to get the first instance of a repository.

And the rest is relatively easy. Just invoke hg.

Setting up CVS for W3C

Setting up CVS for dev.w3.org is a pain each time I do it. This is because I only need to do it whenever there is a new laptop to play with so the details escape me. Future I will however first look up this post and avoid all the hassle. Of course, if the W3C has moved on by that time this will have been a waste of time (now), but Future I will be happy either way. What I remember having done yesterday:

• Putting my keys in ~/.ssh/ with chmod 600. (Do not worry. They are only used for this.)
• Putting export CVS_RSH=ssh in ~/.profile.
• Running CVSROOT=:user@dev.w3.org:/sources/public cvs checkout path/to/stuff.
• Copying two scripts — for XMLHttpRequest and CSSOM — manually.

And when I put it like this. I wonder why it took me way over thirty minutes. Waste of time. Future I, be warned and read this first!

Thoughts on XMLHttpRequest

XMLHttpRequest finally got to W3C Candidate Recommendation. Maybe finally is not the right word. It did take over four years, but defining a specification around something that is already deployed by multiple incompatible implementations is hard work. (HTML5 and CSS 2.1 are other examples of this.) W3C Candidate Recommendation means that we now have to finalize the test suite and get two fully conforming implementations. Once that is done XMLHttpRequest can become a W3C Recommendation.

There is quite some history to XMLHttpRequest prior to its standardization. It started out at Microsoft, was copied by Mozilla, and then gradually made it into other browsers. Most all of that was before I got involved.

I think I got involved because it seemed fun to work on editing a small part of the documentation of the Web platform. Put your name on something. I also underestimated the amount of work. I thought that apart from some minor issues most of the work was already done by Ian in the HTML5 draft (Web Applications 1.0 at the time — that name now refers to something else). I ended up rewriting the normative parts of the draft — that what matters most — several times. This is in part because I was obviously very inexperienced as editor and in part because our understanding of the Web platform increased dramatically since 2006. That we actually had to define the specifics of event queues was not at all anticipated.

Diving into all the little technical changes that have been made over time is probably not too interesting. So I will conclude with a brief summary of the history of the draft. The earliest archived copy of XMLHttpRequest is in the Web Applications 1.0 draft of 1 September 2005 in section 6.2, written by Ian. The W3C published its initial XMLHttpRequest Working Draft in April 2006. It was mostly the same. In February 2007 the initial Last Call Working Draft was published. It already had a lot more detail and the next three years were effectively put into fiddling with the details and fixing minor bugs discovered during implementation — e.g. Alexey from the WebKit project put quite a bit of effort into implementing the draft and giving feedback. Development of additions to XMLHttpRequest — such as events indicating the progress, cross-origin requests, and native support for timeouts — were put into an XMLHttpRequest Level 2 draft. Initially separate, but now XMLHttpRequest and XMLHttpRequest Level 2 drafts are created from the same source, ensuring their text stays consistent.

It is probably worth mentioning that the goals of the W3C Working Group — which itself also changed over time from the Web API WG to the WebApps WG — shifted from simply defining the interoperable subset among browsers to defining a specification all browsers would have to converge towards. Browsers had so many little differences that if we would only prescribe what works everywhere it would not be a very meaningful document and not actually help fight the interoperability issues some browsers were facing. (Again, HTML5 and CSS 2.1 are other examples of this.)

My plan now is to address some outstanding feature requests for XMLHttpRequest Level 2 and start focusing on the test suite. Hallvord and I created some hundred fifty tests in the course of writing the XMLHttpRequest specification, but they need cleaning up and some more need to be added.

Twenty-four

Time seems to go pretty fast. This blog is over seven years old now. My employment by Opera Software over five. And I just reached twenty-four.

In Argentina I got the idea to visit all continents before I turned twenty-five. But if I am to visit Antarctica — the one I am missing when following the seven continents model — it would have to be by sailboat. That seems the most exciting. Turns out that getting a place on a small sailboat is rather hard if you are just by yourself. I will gladly accept any tips — about sailing to Antarctica — as birthday present! :-)

Holy

On the holiest of holy books in my room, the A to Z telephone directory, I swear to tell the truth. Life is empty. But of course, there is some salvation. That is to say, it wasn’t so utterly empty from the very outset. It takes real effort upon effort, an all-out struggle, for us to wear it down, to reduce it to an empty nothing. Here is not the place to go into just how we struggle, how each and every way we wear it down to nothing. Too much trouble. Anyone who simply must know has only to read Romain Rolland’s Jean Christophe. It’s all there.

From the non-existant novel One and a Half Times around the Rainbow by the fictional author Derek Heartfield (who comitted suicide in 1938 by walking of the Empire State Building with a portrait of Hitler in his right hand and an open umbrella in his left) imagined by Huraki Murakami for Hear the Wind Sing.

Strong

“But then again, the conditions are the same for everybody. We’re all riding the same disabled airplane. Sure there are them that get all the breaks and them that don’t. Them that are tough through it all and them that are weak. The rich and the poor. But you know, there’s nobody who’s got more than normal reserves of strength. It’s the same across the board. The haves are forever worrying that they’re going to lose it all, and the have-nots are worried that they’re going to stay have-nots forever. It’s the same for everybody. Anyone who catches on earlier should strive to become that much stronger. Even if they only pretend, right? There’s no strong people around anywhere. Only those who put on a good show of acting strong.”

From Hear the Wind Sing by Haruki Murakami.

Matterhorn Tour

A few days before leaving on vacation to Switzerland we walked into a mountaineering store and found a book called Tour of the Matterhorn by Hilary Sharp. We skimmed through it and thought the seven stages it described could easily be done in the time allotted for our vacation. The evening before leaving we figured out it might be slightly tougher than anticipated, but still doable. Turns out — especially the first two days — walking in the mountains with an eighteen kilo or so backpack is quite exhausting. In fact, I can still feel my legs. Although somewhat shorter (estimated at about hundred forty-five kilometer rather than hundred seventy), the trail was quite a bit tougher than the Tour du Mont Blanc, which we walked a couple of years ago. Back then we did not carry a tent and cooking equipment either. Just like last time I kept some day-to-day logs.

The overall story is much longer of course.

(On Flickr I posted a Matterhorn Tour set.)

Writing

We must all be cut out for what we do, he thought. However you make your living is where your talent lies. He had sold vitality, in one form or another, all his life and when your affections are not too involved you give much better value for the money. He had found that out but he would never write that, now, either. No, he would not write that, although it was well worth writing.

From The Snows of Kilimanjaro by Ernest Hemingway.