I just came across caniuse.com, where Alexis Deveria maintains information on browser support for various Web features. This looks like a nice resource on how widely formats are being adopted.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, Adobe objected to the use of the name TIFF in the TIFF/A Initiative and proposed TIFF profile. Since Adobe holds the trademark, their objection has legal force. Accordingly, TIFF/A has become TI/A (Tagged Image for Archival), and the Initiative is now using the domain ti-a.org. The old domain redirects to the new one.
This is bound to cause some confusion, but it looks as if there wasn’t any choice.
This is my very first YouTube video, intended to give starting-level computer science students an idea of some of the basic issues of file formats. Suggestions on how to make future ones better, in terms of both content and technique, are welcome. If I get serious about these, I’ll invest in something better than the very painful iMovie.
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Some of us know that JPEG uses the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) to do lossy compression. A few people have more than the vaguest idea of what that means, and I don’t claim to be one of them. Today, though, I found a video on YouTube which gets me closer, even though I’m not very inclined toward advanced mathematics. It’s included in my file formats playlist on YouTube.
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TIFF/A is in search of a new name.
Today’s online kickoff discussion for the TIFF/A Initiative was productive in a lot of ways, but the big news for the broader public is that it will have to change its name. Adobe owns the TIFF trademark, and it doesn’t want “TIFF/A” used for the proposed new standard for archival TIFF.
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EPUB is the favorite format for e-books (ignoring Amazon, which like to be incompatible so it can lock users in). EpubCheck is the open-source industry standard for validating EPUB files. If you’re an author creating your own e-book files, you should run them against EpubCheck before releasing them. It’ll make hosting sites happier, since they’ll probably run it themselves and will like your book better if it passes. A book that passes EpubCheck will also give you fewer headaches with readers complaining it doesn’t work on their reader.
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There’s nothing like total failure to give perspective. My request for Patreon supporters got zero response in 32 hours. Zero, to ten decimal places.
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Posted in administrative
The TIFF/A Initiative has announced its kickoff online conference for September 15 at 3 PM CEST. TIFF/A (see my earlier post) is a proposal for a set of rules, not yet defined, for archival-quality TIFF files. It’s still possible to sign up for participation. According to the email, the conference will cover:
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Encoding all the characters of all the world’s languages is an endless task. Unicode 8.0 improves the treatment of Cherokee, Tai Lue, Devangari, and more. For a lot of people, the most interesting part will be the implementation of “diverse” emoji in a variety of colors. A Unicode Consortium report explains:
People all over the world want to have emoji that reflect more human diversity, especially for skin tone. The Unicode emoji characters for people and body parts are meant to be generic, yet following the precedents set by the original Japanese carrier images, they are often shown with a light skin tone instead of a more generic (nonhuman) appearance, such as a yellow/orange color or a silhouette.
Five symbol modifier characters that provide for a range of skin tones for human emoji are planned for Unicode Version 8.0 (scheduled for mid-2015). These characters are based on the six tones of the Fitzpatrick scale, a recognized standard for dermatology (there are many examples of this scale online, such as FitzpatrickSkinType.pdf). The exact shades may vary between implementations.
… When a human emoji is not immediately followed by a emoji modifier character, it should use a generic, non-realistic skin tone.
Files that Last: Digital Preservation for Everygeek, an e-book to bring the message of digital preservation to the broader geek world.
Mad File Format Science 
PDF/A as OAIS SIP container?
A proposal to use PDF/A as a Submission Information Package (SIP) under the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) model has generated a small stir on Twitter.
The aim of a SIP is to deliver a collection of documents in a form suitable for ingesting into an archive. It needs to have enough metadata to create a proper Archive Information Package (AIP). The model doesn’t specify what SIP format(s) an archive should accept. XML files following well-known archival schemas such as METS for the overall package and PREMIS for preservation information are popular.
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