A+ Ajax

Over at the the YUI blog the team just announced the preview release of YUI 3.2.0. YUI3 now has some interesting new features that the team wants you to try and tell them if they work out for you. The changes to the already very powerful library are quite ambitious:

• Touch event support for mobile interfaces including flick and move gestures
• Browser capability loading – which means that every browser gets the least amount of code necessary to make it work
• Transition support for the animation module – meaning only browsers that don’t support CSS3 transitions get the JavaScript animation fallback
• An update to the CSS grids to allow for more flexible layouts
• A ScrollView widget similar to the one in Apple iOS
• The uploader has been transitioned over from YUI2 to YUI3

So check out what is on offer and give the YUI team feedback on what would be nice to have and what is broken. In their own words:

The goal of a preview release is to make it as easy as possible for all of us in the community to evaluate progress of the upcoming release and provide feedback. Please take some time to test 3.2.0pr1 and let us know what you find by filing tickets in the YUI 3 bug database marked as “Observed in version” 3.2.0pr1. We’ll do our best to address preview-release questions on the YUI 3 Forums, too.

There are three ways to get started with the preview release: YUI 3.2.0pr1 is available on the CDN via the 3.2.0pr1 version tag — so you can reference preview-release files like http://yui.yahooapis.com/combo?3.2.0pr1/build/yui/yui-min.js. If you switch to this seed file for the preview release, all subsequent use() statements will continue to load YUI 3.2.0pr1. Or You can download the full YUI 3.2.0pr1 from YUILibrary.com, including source code and examples for all components. Or you can simply explore the functioning examples roster.

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Rick Waldron has detailed the SharedWorker support that Opera has added in 10.6 beta (and has been available in Safari 5 and Chrome 5).

Web Workers are fantastically simple. Simple message passing. No thread locks and semaphores and craziness. However, not being able to share a thing as a constraint is painful, and a nice addition to the spec is the notion of a SharedWorker:

Instead of a single message processing function, workers can attach multiple event listeners, each one performing a quick check to see if it is relevant for the message. If multiple authors wanted to collaborate using a single port to communicate with a worker, it would allow for independent code instead of changes having to all be made to a single event handling function.

To get the Gist of it, Rick put together some GitHub goodness to exemplify the new world:

Basic HTML page for running the test:

The HTML page called in the iframe:

The Renderer (that’s your browser window)

The SharedWorker

This demonstrates how we can connect two different pages to the same SharedWorker process, and track our connections to them from one persistent object variable. Very exciting!

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The WebM project is dedicated to developing a high-quality, open video format for the web that is freely available to everyone.

The WebM launch is supported by Mozilla, Opera, Google and more than forty other publishers, software and hardware vendors.

WebM is an open, royalty-free, media file format designed for the web.

WebM defines the file container structure, video and audio formats. WebM files consist of video streams compressed with the VP8 video codec and audio streams compressed with the Vorbis audio codec. The WebM file structure is based on the Matroska container.

It happened. Today, Google is up on stage at I/O unveiling a new WebM project alongside a slew of partners (notably: Mozilla and Opera on the browser side) that gets the On2 codec out into the open. This is huge news for the fight for Open Video, and everyone will now have eyes on Safari and IE. Microsoft posted a month back about their stance, probably to get it out before this announcement. If folks don’t support this….. it is weak.

YouTube will be a huge push here, and you can go to their html5 version: http://www.youtube.com/html5 and check it out. Today it is available in trunk builds on Chromium and Firefox. Soon, an Opera beta, Chrome dev release, and more.

The project is going after:

• Openness and innovation. A key factor in the web’s success is
  that its core technologies such as HTML, HTTP, and TCP/IP are open
  for anyone to implement and improve. With video being core to the
  web experience, a high-quality, open video format choice is needed.
  WebM is 100% free, and open-sourced under a
  BSD-style license.

• Optimized for the web. Serving video on the web is different
  from traditional broadcast and offline mediums. Existing video
  formats were designed to serve the needs of these mediums and do
  it very well. WebM is focused on addressing the unique needs of
  serving video on the web.

  • Low computational footprint to enable playback on any device,
    including low-power netbooks, handhelds, tablets, etc.*

  • Simple container format

  • Highest quality real-time video delivery

  • Click and encode. Minimal codec profiles, sub-options; when
    possible, let the encoder make the tough choices.

* Note: The initial developer preview releases of browsers supporting WebM are not yet fully optimized and therefore have a higher computational footprint for screen rendering than we expect for the general releases. The computational efficiencies of WebM are more accurately measured today using the development tools in the VP8 SDKs. Optimizations of the browser implementations are forthcoming.

Congrats Open Web.

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Dean Hachamovitch took an opportunity to talk about Microsoft’s point of view on HTML5 video.

Namely, the view that they will only support H.264.

Why do that post now? Get it out before Google I/O and VP8 gets released and opened? Follow Steve Jobs’ attack on Adobe (which talks about the openness of H.264?).

Dean says:

H.264 is an industry standard

Not an open standard.

Robert O’Callahan of Mozilla comments:

Dean, I think it’s quite dangerous for you to say “developers can rely on the H.264 codec and hardware acceleration support of the underlying operating system, like Windows 7, without paying any additional royalty.”

when the Windows 7 H.264 codec is licensed only for non-commercial use. See

http://download.microsoft.com/Documents/UseTerms/Windows%207_Ultimate_English_c44ca3df-8338-4a2f-a176-39d2e68986c4.pdf

THIS PRODUCT IS LICENSED UNDER THE AVC, THE VC-1, THE MPEG-4 PART 2 VISUAL, AND THE MPEG-2 VIDEO PATENT PORTFOLIO LICENSES FOR THE PERSONAL AND NON-COMMERCIAL USE OF A CONSUMER TO (i) ENCODE VIDEO IN COMPLIANCE WITH THE ABOVE STANDARDS (“VIDEO

STANDARDS”) AND/OR (ii) DECODE AVC, VC-1, MPEG-4 PART 2 AND MPEG-2 VIDEO THAT WAS ENCODED BY A CONSUMER ENGAGED IN A PERSONAL AND NON-COMMERCIAL ACTIVITY OR WAS OBTAINED FROM A VIDEO PROVIDER LICENSED TO PROVIDE SUCH VIDEO. NONE OF THE

LICENSES EXTEND TO ANY OTHER PRODUCT REGARDLESS OF WHETHER SUCH PRODUCT IS INCLUDED WITH THIS PRODUCT IN A SINGLE ARTICLE.

Now that Dean has started the conversation, I hope that it is two way…. and a conversation. Will they truly ONLY support H.264? Regardless of codes installed on the system? Of a potential VP8? Never Ogg?

The IE9 preview has been very promising. The Web is the platform, and Microsoft knows they need to be the game. There is very much room for them at the Open Web table, I just hope we all share the bread in a constructive way.

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Heroku is known for its impressive Rails hosting, but on the heals of a post on how they decide their roadmap we see announced support for node.js in private beta.

This is sure to be the first of many chaps putting their hat in the ring. With Ryan Dahl himself at Joyent, you would be shocked if we didn’t have a nice marriage of the Joyent SMART platform and Node.js.

I signed up for the beta and would love to give it a whirl and report back.

In other node.js news:

• Fancy building on a a trivial HTTP proxy server in node?
• How about Web Workers in node.js thanks to Malte Ubl himself
• Speaking of which, the latest Joose has node and CommonJS support

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Jonathan Snook wrote about HTML5 forms and how they are coming. One of the biggest parts of HTML5 is the fact that we get lots of new tags as well as the APIs that we talk most often about.

Part of this is forms, and the new types that we get:

• search
• tel
• url
• email
• datetime, date, month, week, time, and datetime-local
• number
• range
• color

We get validation (required, etc) and more. But, what browsers support it? And, can you use a JS shim on top of HTML5?

For support, there are some good sites out there with a lot more red in the forms section than others:

Anne van Kesteren of Opera has also written recently about HTML5 forms and the rich Opera support.

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I was on a panel at OSBC with Dave Mcallister of Adobe and Brian Goldfarb of Microsoft. I wanted to talk to Brian about canvas in IE9 but held off until later where I even offered the community up to write the IE code ;)

Someone off the record told me last week “it is coming… don’t worry” but that is rumor. And then Russell Leggett sent me a link to a piece by AMD on IE9 and GPU usage that had two interesting quotes:

The <canvas> element will be accelerated on the GPU via Direct2D and will enable hardware accelerated rendering contexts for application development, improving visual display, reducing CPU usage, and improving power usage.

…

AMD is working with multiple teams at Microsoft to ensure that technologies such as IE and Silverlight continue to move the PC platform forward.

Put us out of our misery Microsoft. Don’t make us create a http://petitionforie9tohavecanvas.com website ;)

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Aaron Boodman created Greasemonkey back in the day. He also worked on Gears. And most recently he created Chrome Extensions. I have a funny feeling that folks were pinging him daily “hey, when ya gunna give me Greasemonkey on Chrome” and he just delivered:

One thing that got lost in the commotion of the extensions launch is a feature that is near and dear to my heart: Google Chrome 4 now natively supports Greasemonkey user scripts. Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension I wrote in 2004 that allows developers to customize web pages using simple JavaScript and it was the inspiration for some important parts of our extension system.

Ever since the beginning of the Chromium project, friends and coworkers have been asking me to add support for user scripts in Google Chrome. I’m happy to report that as of the last Google Chrome release, you can install any user script with a single click. So, now you can use emoticons on blogger. Or, you can browse Google Image Search with a fancy lightbox. In fact, there’s over 40,000 scripts on userscripts.org alone.

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