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<title>Haaze.com / sallyfo / All</title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com</link>
<description>Test Web 2.0 Content Management System</description>
<pubDate>Mon, 09 May 2011 07:10:01 +0000</pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Adobe issues CSS Web publishing prototype]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=adobe-issues-css-web-publishing-prototype</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=adobe-issues-css-web-publishing-prototype</comments>
<pubDate>Mon, 09 May 2011 07:10:01 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>sallyfo</dc:creator>
<category>Mobile &amp; Electronics</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=adobe-issues-css-web-publishing-prototype</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Adobe&amp;39's CSS Regions and CSS Exclusions technology lets text flow within defined regions or around defined regions.(Credit:Adobe Systems)SAN FRANCISCO--Hoping to bring magazine-style layout tools to Web publishing, Adobe Systems tonight released a prototype browser specifically designed to let Web developers test the company's proposed formatting technology.The technology, called CSS Regions, lets programmers easily create multi-column layouts, place text in various polygonal shapes, and flow around objects in the middle of text. That technology has existed for years in the print publishing world, but it's generally missing from the Web, and its absence grows ever more conspicuous as magazines and newspapers move to digital publishing, especially ontablets such asApple's iPad.The formatting features are notable, particularly because they're dynamic, said Arno Gourdol, director of engineering for the Flash runtime at Adobe. With them, layouts adjust automatically as people resize browser windows or roate tablets from portrait to landscape orientation.&quot;The quality of what you can build is so much better,&quot; Gourdol said in an interview tonight. &quot;What we want is designers using InDesign [Adobe's layout software typically used with print publications] to push a button and up comes HTML.&quot;Adobe plans to show off the technology tomorrow at the Google I/O conference, which kicks off tomorrow. A major theme of the conference is the advancement of Web development.Adobe's CSS Regions technology can be downloaded from Adobe Labs. Based on feedback from earlier work, Adobe actually split CSS Regions into two parts so it would merge better with other CSS developments such as Flexbox and Grid, Gourdol said. The second half is CSS Exclusions for defining how text flows around defined areas.The technology is notable for one more reason: it's from Adobe.The company has long promoted its Flash Player technology, which for years let programmers reach beyond the capabilities of Web standards such as HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) for describing Web page content and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) for formatting. The company is committed to keeping Flash competitive--the present efforts are support for mobile devices, hardware acceleration, and the &quot;Molehill&quot; interface for 3D graphics. But it's also trying to convince the world that's serious about Web publishing.Adobe&amp;39's proposed CSS extensions would, among other things, let Web developers confine text to a specific shape.(Credit:Adobe Systems)Convincing the world that Adobe cares about more than Flash is something of an uphill battle. However, it does offer the Dreamweaver Web publishing software, and the CSS developments show Adobe is doing real work to reshape what the Web can do. Another example is improvements to the jQuery Mobile library of pre-built JavaScript software.The company's CSS Regions work follows the prevailing Web standards process: discussion at a standards group, in this case the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), that occurs simultaneously with work to implement the software in the real world.Adobe built the technology into &quot;Minibrowser,&quot; Adobe's variation of the WebKit browser engine used both by Apple'sSafari and Google's Chrome. Gourdol looks slightly appalled at the idea of Adobe releasing a real browser, but the company has a strong ally in Google when it comes to carrying its ideas beyond developers.&quot;We have a very good relationship with them,&quot; Gourdol said. Text can reflow automatically across multicolumn layouts, adjusting as the window size changes.(Credit:Adobe Systems) Google also has been a tight ally helping bring Flash to Android phones and building Flash Player directly into Chrome. The partnership goes both ways: Adobe plans to build Google's WebM video technology into Flash Player, a move Adobe Chief Technology Officer Kevin Lynch announced a year ago at Google I/O.Actually, Lynch announced only that Flash Player would get VP8, the video encoding component of WebM. Gourdol confirmed tonight it would get the full WebM support, which also includes the Vorbis audio encoding technology and a container to bundle the data together.However, he wouldn't say when that software would arrive.&quot;We don't have a timetable for it,&quot; Gourdol said of WebM support in Flash. Important factors include hardware support, just getting under way today, and broad use of the technology, he said.An alliance with Google is nice, but Gourdol clearly hopes CSS Regions will catch on broadly as a real standard, not just some isolated subset of the browser world.&quot;We've talked to everyone,&quot; Gourdol said, noting that all the browser makers, though' all of the major ones are active in the CSS working group. They're all very excited about it.Next stop is getting the software accepted. Adobe has a team of 12 programmers in the United States and Romania who work on WebKit, Arno said. Adobe hopes to build its CSS software into the browser engine, making it easy for Google, Apple, and others &quot;downstream&quot; of the central project to incorporate it into their actual browsers.&quot;Webkit is the most interesting area to focus right now because of its mobile presence,&quot; said Paul Gubbay, vice president of engineering for Adobe's design and Web group. &quot;We'll see if the [WebKit] community takes it.&quot; <br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<item>
<title><![CDATA[Justice Department investigates Web video group]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=justice-department-investigates-web-video-group</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=justice-department-investigates-web-video-group</comments>
<pubDate>Fri, 04 Mar 2011 08:10:14 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>sallyfo</dc:creator>
<category>Mobile &amp; Electronics</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=justice-department-investigates-web-video-group</guid>
<description><![CDATA[The corporate wrangling over Web video standards, already a technically and legally complex matter, is getting a lot more complicated with the arrival of a Justice Department antitrust investigation.Specifically, the DOJ is looking into whether the actions of patent licensing group MPEG LA are stifling a Google video encoding technology called VP8, The Wall Street Journal reported last night. The the California State Attorney General's office also is looking into the matter, the newspaper said, citing unnamed sources.MPEG LA licenses patents for Web video encoding technology, including today's widely used H.264, on behalf of a sizable group of companies with hundreds of patents it deems to bear on the technology. As an alternative to H.264, Google last May began offering VP8, the technology at the heart of its $123 million acquisition of On2 Technologies in 2010.At stake in the matter are the financial and legal requirements to digital video, which is getting ever more important as the Internet and the Web rise to prominence as a medium for content. H.264 may be used freely for video that's available freely' by contrast, royalties must be paid to MPEG LA if the content isn't free or if the codec is used in hardware or software products.MPEG LA, which is based in Denver but has offices around the globe, wouldn't confirm or deny an investigation, but it defended its practices.&quot;Time and again MPEG LA's model has been tested not just in the marketplace, but in the courts by those seeking any possible way to avoid their intellectual property obligations or other axes to grind, and each time, MPEG LA has prevailed,&quot; the organization said in a statement. &quot;It is a successful model that the market has widely accepted and which has been approved by competition authorities around the world, including in the U.S.&quot;VP8 is a video codec, which is technology designed to encode and decode video so it can be stored and sent over networks in compact form. Combined with an audio codec called Vorbis, it forms Google's patent-free, open-source WebM technology, which the Internet giant hopes will unencumber streaming video on the Web. Google wants to lower the barriers to Web video use in the hopes that WebM will help people built video directly into Web pages with HTML5 rather than relying on a plug-in such as Adobe Systems' Flash Player.The patent problem Google announced WebM last year, saying people could use VP8 technology royalty-free. But video encoding is a patent-infringement minefield, and VP8 officially entered patent limbo in February when MPEG LA said it was asking for organizations to tell them if they had patents essentially used in VP8.MPEG LA has said it believes VP8 violates others' patents, and formally assembling a list is an essential step toward offering a VP8 patent pool license similar to the one MPEG LA already offers for H.264 and several other video technologies.&quot;We do not believe VP8 is patent-free,&quot; MPEG LA told CNET. &quot;There continues to be interest in the facilitation of a pool license to address the apparent marketplace desire for convenience in accessing essential VP8 patent rights owned by many different patent holders under a single license as an alternative to negotiating individual licenses.&quot;The question that regulators apparently are interested in is whether MPEG LA is essentially quashing VP8. MPEG LA says it's neutral, offering patent pools for the convenience of those who want to implement the technology without the hassle of negotiating license agreements with multiple patent holders.The antitrust situation is something of a reprise of the antitrust concerns that On2 raised in 2002 about MPEG-4 video encoding regarding a patent pool. H.264, also known as AVC and MPEG-4 Part 10, was then just getting started.&quot;MPEG-4 is trying to monopolize the substantially software-based interactive video compression industry, plain and simple,&quot; On2 wrote in a 2002 position paper to the Justice Department. &quot;It is a move by a few very large companies to dominate a market and fix prices. Recent pricing policies by MPEG LA for MPEG-4, and the customer reaction to them are ample evidence of this.&quot;More recently, German software company Nero filed an antitrust lawsuit against MPEG LA last May.&quot;Absolute power has corrupted MPEG LA absolutely,&quot; said Nero, which makes CD- and DVD-burning software, in its complaint. &quot;Once MPEG LA obtained monopoly power in the relevant technology markets, it used that power to willfully maintain or extend its monopolies for years beyond their natural expiration...and administer its licenses in an unfair, unreasonable, and discriminatory manner that stifles competition and innovation, and harms consumers.&quot;Neither case went anywhere. The U.S. District Court for the Central District of California dismissed the Nero case in November.Allies and agendas Google has lined up several allies for WebM. Browser makers Mozilla and Opera Software have built support intoFirefox and Opera, while Google is removing H.264 from Chrome. Another ally is Adobe, which has pledged to add VP8 support into its Flash Player plug-in alongside existing codecs such as H.264.On the other side of the debate are Microsoft and Apple, which support H.264 for HTML5 video in theirSafari and the soon-to-be released IE9 browsers. Those companies also have built H.264 directly into their operating systems. Though they have patents in the H.264 pool that MPEG LA licenses, Microsoft has said it pays MPEG LA twice as much in royalties to ship H.264-enabled products than it receives in royalty payments back. And Apple has only a single patent in the H.264 pool, so it appears its interests in H.264 and MPEG LA are not directly financial.There are plenty of strategic issues involved, though. H.264 is widely used in everything from Blu-ray players to video cameras. It fits neatly into Apple's desire for seamless, high-quality technology that does its job and stays in the background, and using it in HTML5 video helps further Apple's agenda to build a future that doesn't rely on Flash Player.In a 2010 letter to the Free Software Foundation Europe, Jobs cast doubts on freely available codecs, though he specifically named only a commercially unsuccessful progenitor to VP8 called Theora. The letter arrived shortly before Google announced its WebM plans for VP8.&quot;A patent pool is being assembled to go after Theora and other 'open source' codecs now,&quot; Jobs wrote in the e-mail. &quot;Unfortunately, just because something is open source, it doesn't mean or guarantee that it doesn't infringe on others' patents.&quot;Apple has a lot of allies in H.264. But it's virtually impossible that the World Wide Web Consortium, which is standardizing HTML5, would endorse H.264 as a the video codec of choice in HTML5 given its patent encumbrances and the W3C's royalty-free standards work.Microsoft seems more neutral. It advocates H.264 and building H.264 add-ons for Chrome and Firefox on the one hand, but on the other it's helping Google build a WebM browser extension for Windows and says it has no objections if the intellectual property issues are resolved.The Justice Department, Google and Microsoft declined to comment for this story. Apple didn't immediately comment.Updated 3:44 a.m. PT and 8:36 a.m. PTwith responses from DOJ, Google, Microsoft, and MPEG LA.<br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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