[ Home | Articles | Account | People | Projects | FAQ ] Name: Hubert Figuière
Member since: 2001-03-05 13:54:54
Last Login: 2008-03-18 20:15:19
Homepage: http://www.figuiere.net/hub/
Notes: I'm a software engineer working for Novell on OpenOffice. On my copious spare time, when I'm not doing photography or having a life, I work on Free Software projects, mostly Abiword.
Project I'm contributing to:
Jabber: hfiguiere@jabber.org
GTalk (Jabber): hfiguiere@gmail.com
Browser wars: a new hope
Nothing was lost in the browser and in the last years, Firefox has taken back some point in the browser market. So interestingly that after disbanding the team and not doing anything on IE for 5 years but plugging security holes, Microsoft decided to release IE 7, solely for XP SP2 and upward, in the hope to regain some market.
But this is not without counting on Safari.
Safari by itself made Microsoft not develop IE Mac anymore a by itself took a good chunk as the Mac market is somewhat growing a bit. The interesting part is that it is not based on Gecko, but on KHTML, turned into WebKit. Lars Knoll interview gives us a brief overview of the past and the future of KHTML and WebKit development, notably how Apple collaboration ended up working well and how KDE4 will have KHTML coming directly from Apple's repository<sup>[1]</sup>. Now the WebKit for Windows is about to disturb the source: Apple's Windows port did land in the repository, and that port has apparently no relation with the non contribution from Adobe for WebKit + Cairo on Windows<sup>[2]</sup>. I'm still unsure of the direct benefit of the port source code for Free Software, as it apparently use a mix between Windows native GDI and Apple own proprietary CoreGraphics (delivered as a non-free DLL), but nonetheless.
Now how will that still matter for Free Software?
It brings a standard compliant Free Software web rendering engine a broader audience, on that it is different from Gecko. Competition is good, and diversity is good. This engine is at the heart of KDE4, and is being brought to Gtk by the work put in by various contributors, including Alp's port to Maemo (Alp, you rock dude) making it valuable for GMAE and Gnome in general. Nobody will argue, Gnome is in dire need to something better than Gecko for its HTML needs: DevHelp, Yelp, Liferea, Evolution, etc would all benefit from it. All the enhancements made to the main engine, including support for new standards will directly serve the purpose of any Free Software using it.
Even more, being the browser inside the iPhone (and actually Apple's blessed development platform for the iPhone<sup>[3]</sup>), this could leverage enough market share to make WebKit a major browser and have actually enough power to convince the Web 2.0 developers to ensure their development are compatible<sup>[4]</sup> with it. And that is something noticeable. Remember when IE was the only browser tested and that developer didn't care to fix their mistake or standard conformance because anything else was too small for them?
[1] no I didn't say developed by Apple
[2] they released the source of their version but didn't contribute it back to the main WebKit
[3] more on that later
[4] bonus point: the iPhone does not have Flash capabilities which is good for standard compliance
Exempi 1.99.1
I forgot, but Thursday night I released Exempi 1.99.1. The ChangeLog is probably not very obvious be the 2 notable changes are xmp_register_namespace() and NS_CC. The first is to register a new namespace to add to a metadata block. The second is actually the constant for the Creative Commons XMP namespace.
This release is brought to you especially for our friend at Creative Commons.
PresentationML/DrawingML text import
One of the good things with being employed to work on a Free Software project like OpenOffice.org is that you can blog about it, since the code is publicly available. My day to day work is current PowerPoint 2007 import for Impress. This is a joint work between Sun and Novell.
A few weeks ago I implemented the text import from PresentationML (actually from DrawingML). It is far from perfect, but it is getting there. See the example:
It imports the text, the characters and paragraph properties, etc.
... solved
I went ahead and solved the problem on my own with planet OpenOffice.org: I changed the RSS template files to escape their content. I don't know why the behaviour is different between two Python installation, and actually I don't wanna know ;-)
It looks like grep is still one of my best friends.
People aggregating the planet should no longer have issue. Sorry for the mess.
Planet issues...
Dear Lazyweb,
Since I moved planet OpenOffice, it generates invalid RSS feed because it does not escape the content of <dc:author>. The planet version is the same, but the Python version likely is different. I have no power on the version of Python that is installed.
This invalid feed cause problems for people aggregating planet in a feed reader (like I do).
Oh Lazyweb, do you have a magical solution? Your friend Google seems to not have been helpful.
Thanks, love,
Hub
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If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!
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