To validate my assumptions about Gutenberg I cloned my technical blog The Publishing Projecthttps://publishing-project.rivendellweb.net/ and installed the Gutenberg plugin. My blog is not too sophisticated, it uses the two PHP functions below to customize behavior and CSS to add or modify the way things look on the blog. The first function works around a bug in some versions of Chrome where Prism, my syntax highlighter, stopped working when using the clipboard add-on that allows for one-click copy of the highlighted content. It enqueues Prism and clipboard.js and the prism.css style sheet. php // Function to add prism.css and prism.js to...
I got into the discussion for an issuehttps://github.com/Automattic/s/issues/1248 in the \s theme repository regarding Gutenberghttps://wordpress.org/gutenberg/ code blocks. It seems that after the first phase where they will be optional, meaning that if you don't want them or have content that relies on the traditional editor's layout you can choose not to use them or disable them via another plugin, you will be forced to use Gutenberg and its blocks regardless of what you needs are. The assumption that making it easier for everyone to create Wordpress content using Gutenberg blocks is not just misguided but dangerous too without providing an...
Once support for AV1 comes to FFMPEG I will recompile it to include AV1 support. It will, supposedly, provide better compression than HEVC/H265 and not be encumbered by patents to the level of H265 and H264. For an idea of the licensing nightmare HEVC has created see this articlehttps://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/10/03/hevcpatenttermsthrashedoutbutlookwhosnotatthecodecpartymicrosoftandgoogle/ in The Register There are times when I dearly wish I had a GUI to do some of the work, particularly with feature-rich applications like FFMPEGhttps://www.ffmpeg.org/ but we don't always have the chance or the choice. While there are tools like IFFMPEGhttp://www.iffmpeg.com/ they are not as comprehensive as I'd like them...
I've always thought about the concept of an encoding ladder without really knowing what it was and why it was important. I came across the concept again a few weeks ago when researching the AV1 codec. Before jumping into details, let's define what an encoding ladder is: > Your encoding ladder is the set of encoding parameters that you use to create the various files that you deliver adaptively to your web viewers. These encoding parameters can live in your on-premise encoder, in your cloud encoder, or in your online video platform OVP. Five Signs Your Encoding Ladder May Be...
Something to keep an eye out for regarding royalty-free video codexes is AV1 from the Streaming Media Alliancehttps://www.streamingvideoalliance.org/. While it's still under development with a final code freeze expected by 12/31/17 it shows promise of doing better than HEVC and not having any of the royalty nightmares from HEVC patent pools. Before diving into AV1, let's take a look at the organization building it, the Alliance for Open Media. In What is AV1?http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/Editorial/What-Is-.../What-is-AV1-111497.aspx Jan Ozer writes: > The Alliance for Open Media was announced on September 1, 2015, with charter members Amazon, Cisco, Google, Intel Corporation, Microsoft, Mozilla, and Netflix....
Apple announced support for HEIF and HEVC high-performance video and image formats in macOS High Sierra at WWDC in 2017. While you can create content and share it free of charge all other users require content producers to license content for distribution. Unlike h264 there are multiple patent pools for HEVC, each with its own royalty schemes and cost for developers and, eventually, end users. The HEVC patent pools I'm aware of are: - HEVC Advancehttps://www.hevcadvance.com/ - MPEG-LAhttp://www.mpegla.com/main/default.aspx - Velos Mediahttp://velosmedia.com/ Other patent holders are not joining pools and want to license their technologies individually I know that Apple has...
I was working on reencoding videos to HEVC from DVD content I had ripped off before I lost access to a DVD player on my laptop. Yay, Apple. I couldn't understand why the captions in .ass format would not render with the formatting they were created with. A quick jump on the FFMPEG web chat made it clear that it was a container issue, not a caption or re-encoding one. Not all container formats support the same feature sets. Wikipedia's Comparison of Video Containershttps://www.wikiwand.com/en/Comparisonofvideocontainerformats gives you an idea of the breadth and depth of the container fields out there. This...
One thing that has always intrigued me is how people read online and how it affects the way we structure web content. Most of my influence comes from Jakob Nielsen and the Nielsen Norman group's research on how people read online. Back in 1997, Nielsen reported that: > As a result, Web pages have to employ scannable text, using > > - highlighted keywords hypertext links serve as one form of highlighting; typeface variations and color are others > - meaningful sub-headings not "clever" ones > - bulleted lists > - one idea per paragraph users will skip over any...
When we talk about visual disabilities we usually concentrate on color blindness without realizing that that are other visual accessibility issues that we tend to ignore. This came to bite me when I was testing a page using Chrome Dev Tools accessibility Test process fully described in Accessibility: Test your contenthttps://publishing-project.rivendellweb.net/accessibility-test-your-content/ where the color of my code blocks using Prism and the Solarized light theme were not providing enough contrast between text and background. At an instinctual level I understand why this is important but how much contrast is too little and how do I measure it? What role does...
We normally work with the stylesheets we develop for the content we create. This is one of the style sheets available and that interact in the CSS cascade: The browser has a basic style sheet that gives a default style to any document. These style sheets are named user-agent style sheets The author of the Web page defines styles for the document. These are the most common style sheets The reader, the user of the browser, may have a custom style sheet to tailor its experience The user-agent is outside our control and it should stay that way. It's the...
