Sunday, August 09, 2009
Moving day
This blog is now located at Wordpress. Old posts will remain here for the foreseeable future, but all new posts will be at the new location.
The reason for this move is the increasingly capricious policies of Blogspot (i.e., Google) in declaring blogs to have "objectionable content." I haven't been affected by that, not counting the time they mysteriously declared this a "spam blog" several years ago along with dozens or hundreds of other blogs, but I'm hoping Wordpress will be a more reasonable host.
If you're using http://www.mcgath.com/fileformatsblog to bookmark this blog, then you won't be affected, except that you won't even see this post and the look will be a bit different.
You'll have to register for a Wordpress account if you want to comment there. There may also be an Open ID option.
Monday, August 03, 2009
JHOVE 1.4
JHOVE 1.4 is now available on SourceForge. The main change is that PDF/A compliance is more accurately identified than before, and is based on the final standard rather than a draft.
Friday, July 31, 2009
JPEG XR is ISO standard
JPEG XR, formerly known as Microsoft HD Photo, is now an international standard, as reported in a JPEG press release.
Thanks to Bill Crow's blog for calling this to my attention.
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
JHOVE2 workshop
A workshop on JHOVE2 will be held after the conclusion of iPres 2009 in San Francisco, on October 7, 2009. This will include, for the first time, a presentation of the prototype code.
Labels: JHOVE
Wednesday, July 01, 2009
Jumping the gun on HTML 5
With the release of Firefox 3.5, references to the "HTML 5 standard" are on the rise in tech news. CNET refers to "new standards such as HTML 5." The Christian Science Monitor says "this latest version [of Firefox] adds support for the HTML 5 web standard." BNET Technology has a whole article on HTML 5 without once suggesting that it isn't in final form.
But as the World Wide Web Consortium notes, HTML 5 is still a long way from being settled. The latest working draft states: "Implementors should be aware that this specification is not stable. Implementors who are not taking part in the discussions are likely to find the specification changing out from under them in incompatible ways." (Emphasis in the original.)
This most likely means that there will be several different "HTML 5"s from different vendors, and that it will be a long time before they all come close to agreement. HTML 5 was intended to close the gap among different implementations by specifying more aspects of the language and basing it on an object model rather than a syntactic one, but we're probably in for more of the same techno-Babel.
Thursday, June 11, 2009
DROID 4.0
The National Archives (UK) has released DROID 4.0, the latest version of its file format identification tool.
The focus of the latest major release is the inclusion of the DCS (Digital Continuity Service) and Planets, Collection Profiler. DROID now runs in two modes. The original file identification mode, and the new “profile” mode that allows users to obtain file format information gathered from large distributed sources of digital files, providing users with aggregated statistical data and reports to help them take appropriate management decisions regarding risk associated with such large collections of files.
Labels: DROID
Saturday, June 06, 2009
JHOVE 1.3 is out
JHOVE 1.3 is now available. This version includes fixes to some serious bugs in the PDF module. It now has a much lower rate of spurious rejections. Read the release notes for full details.
I've already made a few post-release changes to source code, removing a stack dump for debugging purposes which I'd inadvertently left in, and updating version information where I'd forgotten to. Sigh ... I need to put all the configuration information in one place, instead of having it scattered through a dozen source files, before the next release.
Labels: JHOVE, preservation
