The Luminas Weblog

On the road again...

Orixo: the XML business alliance

Today sees the public launch of Orixo, the XML business alliance of 6 European companies including Luminas.

Other companies involved are Anyware Technologies, Otego, Outerthought, Pro-netics and S & N.

For more information, see the Orixo web site.

Successful launch

The launch went off without a hitch yesterday. Everyone seemed really impressed with the site, which was a relief. It was great to see it on a large plasma screen, too. Rebecca was quite rightly very proud of her design.
Having recovered from the champagne, it's time to get back to the grindstone!

morning train

IE rant

I spend quite a lot of time talking on the web-support JISCMail list. Last night I was feeling particularly irritated by MS software, and so I thought I'd aggregate some of the things I'd read recently about Internet Explorer. Far from receiving an inbox full of flames, the rant was actually reasonably well-received, so I thought I'd duplicate it here for your edification!

Warning: wild accusations and anti-MS bias follows.

The general consensus on the web appears to be that IE is largely irrelevant now (in fact if not yet in statistics), and that tying it to the OS is the best thing they can do, since we'll simply all ignore it then.

For example, see Tim Bray's weblog.

I should probably say "on the blogs" rather than "on the web", but since the web usually repeats whats in the blogs several weeks-months after the fact, it's more or less the same thing.

Some say the general consensus was more likely to be that MS has won the browser war, with claims based on somewhat more than one Web site that IE has > 90%.

I'd say they only won a few battles. I think history is about to prove that they got it horribly, horribly wrong.

For instance:

- MS have failed to get a foothold in the mobile phone arena, while Opera is cheerfully churning out groundbreaking mobile browsing software. From a look at the odds (Nokia with goodness knows how much market share and with a deep distrust of MS), I don't think they have a chance. Mobiles are going to take over the world as far as portable computing is concerned, and people will want the same browser on all platforms. And MS will be sidelined.

- Microsoft have a significantly diminished browser development team, if in fact the browser team exists at all.

Now you may scoff and say "of course they have a browser team", but to my mind, if the browser is embedded in the OS from now on, why do they need a specific team for it? Won't they just have the "Office HTML team", the "Outlook HTML team", etc? And as you'll remember from the last time MS made that mistake (with Windows 95, where no two MS applications dealt with web/internet in the same way), it'll be an almighty mess. And frankly, MS are too busy panicking about all the other products they have that are sinking, to worry about something that doesn't contribute to their bottom line.

- People are learning about choice. With the recent shanigans with new MS licensing terms, people have actually begun to look at alternatives. Once they get used to installing Eudora and Openoffice.org, it's not difficult to believe they'll also install Mozilla.

- Microsoft will loose market share. The "buzz" at the moment is the sheer number of people switching to the new Mac laptops. I'm talking about *huge* numbers of developers, here. And with Safari, they sure don't need IE. I'm not suggesting that everyone will wind up using Macs. But if many of the people developing web sites are not using Windows/IE, then suddenly those IE-specific web pages will start evaporating, and we have no reason to keep IE around.

- Security. 'Nuff said on that one.

We have to continue to lobby for accessibility and use of standards, because it's still possible to get that wrong regardless of which browser is "top dog". But frankly, I don't think we need to argue any more against IE - there are better fights for us to pick.

It's a nice daydream, isn't it?

David jumps into Luminas blogging

How can you compete with MS?

I spent a horrific Wednesday morning dealing with the amazing mess that MS Word outputs under the dubious label of "HTML". Basically, I had to clean up the output so that we can do something useful with it down the line. Even "tidy" balked at it, and only managed to make the stuff well-formed. Compare:

... with ....

So what's my point? Well, in this case, the most suitable tool for producing the original document was a word processor. Word is the most common word processor. Word professes to output HTML, but doesn't -- it outputs so much additional garbage that the HTML is all but useless. And yet it's so dominant that anyone switching to an alternative has a really hard time interoperating. Which means we wind up just having to deal with it.

How many man-hours are lost each day around the world by people having to clear up Microsoft's mess?

IRC resurgence

It's great to see others getting into irc. We've been using it at Luminas since the beginning (and before that, too). Pretty much an essential tool when your team are geographically dispersed, which is the case for us rather frequently. Definitely an underrated method of real-time online communication!

Pitching

Exhausted. David and I just got back from London, where we were pitching to run an Open Source Advisory Service for the JISC. They were a tough audience - the panel had 10 people on it, and they asked the questions we didn't want to answer, and none of the questions we'd prepared answers for ;-)

Apparently we won't hear who it's been awarded to until next Monday, so another week of chewing fingernails.

We also got a chance to meet up with Jeremy Quinn, another Cocoon committer, whom we had lunch with at a great Malaysian place in Soho. It was good to catch up with him and share a few neurons.

Catching up

Phew! Just cleared one of my inboxes of cocoon-users email I'd been queueing up, ready for the all-new cocoon-url blog. Gives the blog a bit of a content head-start, anyway. Time to go buy a license for Movable Type now, so we can officially use it for our company blogs. Oh, and to move DNS around so we can publicise the URLs, too.

Welcome!

Luminas are getting into blogging in a big way!

We've been experimenting behind closed doors for quite some time, and of course following the blogs of such luminaries as Matthew Langham, Steven Noels, Russell Beattie, Ben Hammersley, (etc, etc, etc!). But it's only since we upgraded our server that we thought we could get away with running blogging software full-time.

Keep watching for more additions, including the cocoon blog, and personal blogs from the Luminas team ...