Day: January 28, 2006

Why doesn’t Fedora Core 4 ship with FLAC support enabled in XMMS? I get the whole MP3 thing; I’m cool with that. All my ripped CDs are in Ogg Vorbis, because that’s the sort of left-wing tree-hugging pinko Free Software zealot I am. But FLAC, the Free Lossless Audio Codec, it’s pretty free.

FLAC is the only example I can think of where the shiny new free format completely decimated the entrenched non-free format. It clubbed SHN to within inches of its life and left it lying in a ditch. And it’s stood strong against Apple’s best efforts to strangle lossless audio with Digital Restrictions Management using ALE.

FLAC is a winner. Let’s treat it as such.

Planet readers should now skip on to Christian’s excellent post on GPL and DRM. This paragraph isn’t for you. Hi Silke. I love you.

If you watch mailing lists and IRC carefully, and you keep your eye out for the word “DocBook”, you’ll see a trend emerge. People like to complain that the HTML you get from DocBook looks ugly. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

These days, you have basically two options for converting DocBook to HTML: Either you use Norm’s pan-galactice all-singing-all-dancing XSLT, or you use mine. Mine don’t provide as many options, and they still lack support for some of the more complex book-oriented stuff, but they’re mighty fast.

People said DocBook was slow, so I set out to prove them wrong. Now they say it’s ugly. So, hey, a challenge. Understand that any amount of prettification necessarily involves dictating style. Try writing HTML without any CSS or other fancy styling stuff. It looks ugly. So the goal here is to continue to make the generated XHTML generic, but to make the default CSS styling nicer. And there’s my long-standing goal of making Yelp do less customization to gnome-doc-utils than it currently does.

So, mockups:
BeanStalk Manual
Working with Beans
Purchasing Beans (includes an admonition)
Bean Storage and Care (includes a program listing)

These are rough sketches, and there are a few problems still. The XHTML behind them is clean, and easy to create from DocBook source. Everything is in the CSS. More to come later.