I’ve no idea how the web video format war will end. My preference is that a free, non-patent encumbered, high-quality video codec will become the standard, and WebM is the best fit for that description. Despite the recent announcement by the MPEG LA, the patent pool which controls licensing of H.264, that it will always be free for ‘video delivered to the internet without charge’, that still doesn’t make it free-as-in-speech, and still not free-as-in-beer for anyone wanting to build a business around video encoding/decoding (which includes, if I’m not mistaken, bundling it with a browser). All that said, my preference is meaningless in the face of so many vested business interests.

But this post isn’t really about that; it’s about clearing up a misconception. One common statement I keep seeing repeated (WebMonkey said this in May, but I’ve seen it even more recently) is that Safari will be the only browser to not support WebM, when even the Internet Explorer team have promised to. That’s not the case. What the IE team said was that they will support WebM (or rather, the VP8 codec) as long as the user has installed the codec on Windows. Safari’s position is identical, they just haven’t publicly stated so.

The current free alternative to H.264, OGG video, is also not supported in Safari — but you can play OGG videos in Safari by downloading and installing the Xiph Quicktime Components. Likewise, Windows Media files are supported through Flip4Mac. WebM can be supported in Safari in the same way, as soon as someone creates a QuickTime plugin (I believe experimental support is in Perian already). This is exactly the same situation as with IE.

Where this doesn’t apply is on mobile devices; many — principal amongst them, the iOS range — don’t allow extra codecs to be installed. However, this is slightly supplemental to my point, which is that both IE and Safari — on desktop — are capable of playing WebM via a plugin. I believe that if people will install the Flash plugin, they will install the WebM plugin — and when we have choice and competition, a true standard can be reached by consensus, rather than financial clout.

Bear in mind that I’ve only really noticed the power of TXP in the last year or so, and there may be a heap of other plugins that I’m unaware of; listed below are just my favourites that I’ve discovered so far.

First, as I mentioned before, is the Restyled Admin Interface theme. I find the default admin theme to be plain (if not ugly) and the tabs and links too small, so this modified theme makes it a little fresher and easier to use. Also, if you’re delivering a TXP site to a client, you may want to consider a branded interface.

TXP uses keywords to provide folksonomic descriptions of articles, but on a fresh install they have no interactive properties. Tru_tags (latest (undocumented) release available here) extends keywords into a full-featured tagging utility, allowing you to categorise and increase the findability of your articles.

A must for any modern blogging software (sadly) is a spam filter, and mem_akismet integrates the popular (and excellent) Akismet filter into TXP. You will need a WordPress.com API key, however.

Another vital feature is provided by wet_parachute, which flashes up an alert if you navigate away from an article without saving your data. I’ve lost incomplete articles in this way before; this would have saved me the time I spent rewriting them.

For the times when you need to take your site offline temporarily: cbs_maintenance_mode provides a switch to toggle between states, and displays a 503 error message page.

Once your site is up and running, rah_sitemap generates a sitemaps.org compatible XML file which will aid search engines to crawl your site. The default options should be sufficient, but a customisation panel is also provided for you to fine-tune the output.

I think these five plugins and the admin theme mod provide tweaks that really complement the already impressive default install; in fact, I’d suggest that their functionality be rolled into the next release.

That said, there are so many plugins available that I’m sure I’ve missed some important ones; if so, do be sure and let me know in the comments.

Here’s a quick round-up of a few links that have grabbed my interest over the past weeks; I’d like to write more about them, but time forbids.

Yahoo’s New Application Platform Is Heavy On Social Features

The work that Yahoo (sorry, I refuse to use the exclamation mark) has been doing on open web standards and platforms recently has been fantastic, and the recently-announced Yahoo Open Strategy looks like a logical next step. I don’t agree with this article’s conclusion that this is Yahoo playing catch-up with Facebook, but otherwise it’s a good introduction.

Windows Toolkit Gives Oomph to Microformats

For a company that so often gives the impression (perhaps not always fairly) that it has no time for open standards, Microsoft’s support for Microformats has been impressive. As well as the hAtom-powered Slices feature in IE8, the recently released Oomph toolkit provides in-browser Microformats detection (similar to Firefox’s Operator) and a set of standard CSS styles. Nice work.

Firefox Themes: The Contention Between Visual Hierarchy and Toolbar Customization

A really interesting look at the theory behind the design of the Firefox 3 toolbar and icon set, as well as a general overview of visual hierarchy and interactive design.

Microsummaries work by creating an XML file which is polled on a regular basis by the user agent to check for updates; WebSlices work on the same principal, although they leverage the power of Microformats instead. A very simple WebSlice could be marked up like so:

<div class="hslice" id="myid">
<h2 class="entry-title">Title</h2>
<p class="entry-content">Lorem ipsum dolor</p>
</div>

If that code was embedded in a page and you were using IE8, the notifier would light up and alert you to the presence of the WebSlice, allowing you to subscribe (see image below). Every hour (or time period specified) the browser would check that code to see if it had been updated, and alert you accordingly. Pretty slick.

The entry-title and entry-content classes are taken from the hAtom Microformat, which is also a good move on the IE team’s part, as it shows they are taking notice of movements in semantic markup. It also means hSlice can be implemented into other Microformat tools; Daniel Glazman has already put together a Firefox/Greasemonkey add-on.

You can read more about WebSlices and learn how to implement them on your site by downloading the White Paper. IE comes in for a lot of stick from the web dev community — myself included — but I’m happy to say I think they’ve got this one right.

* I should mention that this also sounds pretty similar to Apple’s Web Clip function, although I haven’t had the opportunity to try that out yet.

Luckily there are a few tools out there which will help you show off the benefits of using Microformats, and involve little work from you.

King amongst tools, of course, is Operator, an add-on for Firefox which finds data in pages and presents you with options to transform them using a series of web-based tools. If the person you’re trying to convince doesn’t use Firefox and/or have Operator installed, however, there are a few good tools available online to show their potential.

hAtom is a microformat used for marking up blog posts or other serialised content. Using the Optimus tool you can turn any page marked up with hAtom into an RSS feed, by adding a link on your page in the following format:

http://microformatique.com/optimus/
?uri=http://www.example.com/&format=RSS

Optimus will return correctly formatted XML for users to subscribe to. It’s also a decent validator for other Microformats (although actually seems to struggle a little with hAtom in that department).

hCard is the standard for marking up contact details, and there is a tool from Brian Suda which will convert them into vCards for you; Technorati also have a test implementation of this tool available, which I’ll link to as they no doubt have better servers. To extract vCards from a page which has hCard markup, simply create a link in this format:

http://feeds.technorati.com/contacts/http://www.example.com/

You can then either save the generated vCard, or add it directly to your address book.

Also from Brian Suda / Technorati comes the hCalendar tool, which transforms your data into the iCalendar standard. Again, you just link to your marked-up page using a specially formatted URL, although this time you get two choices;

http://feeds.technorati.com/events/http://www.example.com/

… returns a single .ics file with each of your events to add to a calendar; while:

webcal://feeds.technorati.com/events/http://www.example.com/

… produces a webcal feed which is updated regularly, allowing subscription to your events.

Implement these tools on your web pages and you’ll have a suite of neat features you can impress your visitors and peers with. It’s a real advantage of using Microformats.

First, the new password manager displays as a bar along the top of the screen rather than an alert, meaning you can see if your password works before choosing to store it. One small usability point is that the option ‘not now’ is displayed only as a close button; this appears at first as if your only options are ‘remember’ or ‘never’. Opera’s implementation is clearer on this point.

The intelligent history search now looks for words in the titles of pages, not just in the URLs. This is probably my favourite new feature of the UI; it’s incredibly useful if you can remember what a page was about, but not its URL. Opera, however, goes one step further and searches the content of pages in the history, meaning you can find what you want even if the page doesn’t have a logical title.

Places, the new Bookmarks functionality, allows you to tag and star your favourite websites then recall them quickly. It works a lot like sites such as del.icio.us or ma.gnolia.com, although without those two sites’ big advantage: getting to your bookmarks from different locations. The new Opera has the synchronize facility, which keeps your links current no matter where you log in from; this is a function that Places is crying out for. Otherwise, it’s a useful tool.

Of course, both browsers are in beta status at the moment, so plenty could change, but if Opera 9.5 already has my new favourite features, why will Firefox 3 still be my browser of choice? The add-ons architecture. Above all else, that’s why I keep loyalty to Firefox when I now have no shortage of options across the different platforms. Sorry, Opera; you make a great browser, but until you dump Widgets and allow extensions, you’re my second choice.

According to the spec, User agents should support Ogg Theora video and Ogg Vorbis audio, as well as the Ogg container format; Firefox and Opera do so natively, while Webkit does so with a plugin for Quicktime (see Xiph.org).

According to my site stats — which are very far from being representative — roughly 60% of my visitors use one of the three browsers mentioned above; that’s a pretty big potential market. And remember, what the geeks use now, everybody will use in a year or two.

That makes a strong case for microformats. At least, I’m sold. Now how do we convince the other 99% of the world who have no idea what they are?

The first thing that changed my mind for me was seeing Dan Cederholm’s presentation, Interface Design Juggling. He clearly explained their benefits, and made me think about ways my own sites could be enhanced by them.

The second thing was the suite of tools supplied by Technorati; the hCard and hCalendar convertors are easy ways to display how useful a little bit of standardised mark-up can be.

The third thing — and the real deal-clincher — was the Operator add-on for Firefox. This displays a small icon in the browser which alerts you to the presence of microformats on the page, then allows you to use the data for an amazing array of purposes; adding events to your calendar or contact details to your address book, searching for addresses in online maps, searching the leading social websites for related content… it really shows the potential of the semantic web.

For anyone still not convinced of the benefits of microformats, I urge you to install Operator and right-click on the following paragraph; once you see what you can do with it, you’re unlikely to remain unconvinced.

This post was written by Peter Gasston, who lives in Camberwell, South-East London in the United Kingdom. You can email him at peter@broken-links.com if you want to say hello.