Why are Opera & Mozilla/Firefox against implementing the H.264 codec in their browsers? If it’s a question of licensing H.264 or losing the HTML5 tag, you would think they’d choose to save HTML5. What am I missing?

Since the beginning of the Web, individuals and companies, commercial and non-commercial, have been able to produce and distribute content in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, images, and text on the Web without paying licensing fees for the use of any of those amazing technologies.

Since the beginning of the Web, individuals and companies, commercial and non-commercial, have been able to create tools that helped content producers make and distribute HTML, CSS, JavaScript, images, and text on the Web without paying licensing fees for the use of those amazing technologies.

Since the beginning of the Web, individuals and companies, commercial and non-commercial, have been able to make clients (like Web browsers) that display HTML, CSS, JavaScript, images, and text on the Web without paying licensing fees for the use of those amazing technologies.

This is the critical feature of the Web that makes it different from all other media and communication tools that have come before it. This is what makes it possible for tiny little start-ups to become a Facebook or a Google or a Mozilla.

Simply put, this freedom from licensing requirements is what makes the Web great. We, the community of people who make the Web what it is, should not be so quick to toss that all important foundation aside just because some hardware or OS vendors think it’s the easy or most profitable path.

Asa’s blog post can be found here.

What is Barcamp?

A BarCamp is an “unconference” – an open, participatory event where the attendees are the presenters. The first BarCamp was held in Palo Alto, Ca., in 2005. Since then more than 350 cities on six continents have hosted BarCamps. The first BarCamps focused on early-stage web applications, open-source technologies, and open data formats; but the format has been adapted to serve a variety of other industries and issues, including public transit, health care, real estate and political organizing.

If you are in the Jonesboro Arkansas area get registered and I will see you there!

In the Firefox 4 nightly builds, and in Firefox 4 Beta 1, we are changing the default tab position so that tabs are on top. This is a preference that users can change by right clicking on any of their toolbars. Moving the default tab position is obviously a significant and to some extent controversial change to the Firefox UI, which is why we made the video above to help explain our rationale.

Contributors who are active in the Mozilla community will know that this debate literally goes back for years. So in some respects this video will serve as quick summary of all of the different arguments both for an against the change. But the more interesting part isn’t about looking back, it’s about looking forward. Recently modern browsers have been transitioning to placing tops on top, and that decision isn’t arbitrary, it isn’t about fashion. The change to placing tabs on top isn’t about one browser versus another browser, it’s about the evolution of the Web as a platform. Read the rest at Alex Faaborg’s Blog.

My sediments exactly Mr. Stallman.

(A segment of an interview done by Robin Good)
Master New Media