[Coco] A bit more of CoCo history dies...

[Aaron Wolfe]

On Fri, Aug 7, 2009 at 5:45 PM, Gene Heskett<gene.heskett at verizon.net> wrote:
> On Friday 07 August 2009, Aaron Wolfe wrote:
>>On Fri, Aug 7, 2009 at 4:57 PM, Stephen H.
>>
>>Fischer<SFischer1 at mindspring.com> wrote:
>>> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Gene Heskett"
>>> <gene.heskett at verizon.net> To: "CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts"
>>> <coco at maltedmedia.com> Sent: Friday, August 07, 2009 9:10 AM
>>> Subject: Re: [Coco] A bit more of CoCo history dies...
>>>
>>>> Not to denegrate what Stephen was trying to do in our discussion, but
>>>> this is
>>>> typical of a government operation, particularly when they are told to
>>>> make the
>>>> data available to the public.  They will carefully research what is
>>>> available,
>>>> and purposely choose a method, that while publicly available, is so
>>>> obscure
>>>> that no one has the secret decoder ring.  And of course we didn't get the
>>>> memo
>>>> either.  :(
>>>
>>> What are the alternatives to Adobe shockwave that have more than 0.001% of
>>> the market?
>>>
>>> There might be one in Google's set of products, or is MS's Silverlight
>>> one.
>>>
>>> I looked at the list of programs installed on my Vista Laptop and could
>>> only find Adobe Shockwave and MS's Silverlite.
>>>
>>> SHF
>>
>>Most things that use Shockwave or other proprietary formats can be
>>done using open, standard tools.  From what I saw of the presentation
>>(it did not work 100% for me) it did nothing that couldn't have been
>>implemented in HTML/javascript.  Of course js is not quite an open
>>standard, but certainly more so than shockwave or silverlight.
>>
>>The upcoming HTML 5 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_5) hold much
>>promise for making these proprietary formats unnecessary.  It will be
>>interesting to see what direction the online world takes.
>>
>>-Aaron
>>
> Probably wrong Aaron, html-5 will not solve the problem because it will not
> officially set a codec standard, not even in the mud, let alone stone.
> Everybody on the committee has an axe to sharpen, and no one would give ground
> to a competitors product.  Theora has promise, so does mp4, but they simply
> couldn't agree, so they agreed to disagree, and that language has been removed
> from html-5 as it stands, as of 2 weeks or so ago.

while the removal of ogg support as a requirement is dissapointing, it
is still allowable to use the <audio> and <video> tags with ogg
content, just not mandated.  already firefox and opera have support
for ogg in this context.  it may turn out that, like other common
formats that over time have come to be widely supported (png being a
good example), the official standard will take a back seat to real
world usage.  time will tell.

for an application such as the presentation discussed in this thread,
which does not use video (unless there was some that just didn't work
for me :), html 5 will provide some interesting capabilities outside
of the codec situation.  specifically, the canvas tag provides
"dynamic scriptable rendering of bitmap images", which would encompass
everything I saw happening in this presentation.  of course there is
also controversy surrounding this new feature (gee thanks Apple)..
nothing is ever simple :)

-Aaron