File Formats Blog

"W3C is pleased to announce the creation of the Emotion Incubator Group to investigate a language to represent the emotional states of users and the emotional states simulated by user interfaces."

Shouldn't that be "Emoticon Incubator Group"? ;)

# posted by Gary McGath @ 10:32 AM 0 comments

A working draft of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) Tiny 1.2 is now available online. Quoting the abstract:

This specification defines the features and syntax for Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) Tiny, Version 1.2, a modularized language for describing two-dimensional vector and mixed vector/raster graphics in XML. SVG Tiny 1.2 is the baseline profile of SVG, implementable on a range of devices from cellphones and PDAs to desktop and laptop computers, and is the core of SVG 1.2. Other SVG 1.2 specifications will extend this functionality to form supersets (for example, SVG 1.2 Full).

# posted by Gary McGath @ 3:46 PM 0 comments

A bug in JHOVE showed up as a result of an inconsistency in the EXIF 2.2 spec. In one place it says that the GAINCONTROL (41991) tag should have a RATIONAL (type 5) value; in another place it says it should have a SHORT (type 3) value. Since the tag can take only a small enumerated set of integer values, SHORT is the obvious choice, and turns out to be correct. See discussion on the EXIF forum.

# posted by Gary McGath @ 1:53 PM 0 comments

Here's an interesting article on ZDNet on Microsoft's newly-announced support of OpenDocument format. As the author notes, proprietary formats have one advantage over open ones: they can adapt more quickly to new needs, since no standardization process is required. By the same token, existing documents in the format can become obsolete more quickly. Both have their place, but we should remember that using non-open document formats for long-term archiving is a very risky strategy.

# posted by Gary McGath @ 3:02 PM 0 comments