There have been a few things I wanted to write about, but I manage to never get around to actually do it. So here it goes, before I postpone it yet again. While in Norway for Opera’s annual Christmas party (fun was had) I was able to buy the album Destination by trio42, an ensemble my brother is part of. Via my phone, on iTunes. So easy these days. My brother is probably the sole reason I go to classical music concerts and listen to classical music in general. And I enjoy it greatly. Currently anticipating his solo debut album.
A little before that, I was in Tokyo and worked on the Fullscreen Standard. The API is largely done, but rendering specifics might drastically change still. There I also wrote a parser and validator for WebVTT in ECMAScript. The result is the Live WebVTT Validator. I had never written something semi-serious in ECMAScript before, so that was cool. Together with Mike I climbed Mount Maehotaka. Japan’s eleventh highest mountain as the elderly man told us at the top. Without either food or water this was rather rough, but the view was pretty spectacular. Took a few days to walk sensibly again after that though.
Between those two events there was TPAC (yearly big W3C meeting), where I had the pleasure to get a personal thank you from Jeff Jaffe. There are many things wrong at the W3C, but he inspires confidence in that they will overcome them. Open minded, constantly evaluating, and committed to change. TPAC was close to San Francisco this year by the way, and just before, I went from Tokyo to the Netherlands for a few days. Oops. Other than meetings, going through my inbox, and cycling over the Golden Gate bridge not much was published, but I had a great time after the sleepiness was over.
Back to Norway, last week, Dominique (better known as dom) created a repository so I could publish the Encoding Standard, based on research I did last year. It is still very much work in progress, but has already helped Opera and Mozilla to make adjustments to their browsers to become more interoperable. Currently encoding documentation is all over the place and misses important details, which makes it harder for people who write software that consumes (legacy) content on the internet to interoperate. I want to change that. If you are a web developer, this matters less to you, just use UTF-8.
There is more, but I should really get some food.