Hoi, To celebrate the 5000th word of nl:wiktionary, I have uploaded 100 .ogg files to Commons. These are Dutch words pronounced by me. While doing this excercise, I have written a blurp about sound and how to handle it on Wikimedia. The piece is still in Dutch, it is still in nl:wiktionary, but I have asked the nl:wikipedia crowd to review it. When this is done, I will translate it in English and post it in Meta ? en:Wikipedia ? Please let me know..
One thing that is non obvious is that a sound file is supposed to be an image; the name for a *sound* file is: "Image:Title.ogg". Can this be changed to be Sound or something ??
I have read the posts about Firefox and the problems that we have supporting Internet Explorer. Would it be an idea to suggest that Wikimedia is best experienced with Firefox / Opera / .. I am myself a fan of Firefox, it really increases my productivity using two screens with 9 tabs on average. That is what the Firefox experience is for me :) Seriously though, when we do not allow MP3, would it not make equally good sense to suggest that our content is best experienced not using IE ?? Needless to say, we would continue the support for IE !!
It only needs to be a small statement on our main page or on our user portal ...
Thanks, GerardM
Gerard Meijssen wrote: <snip>
I have read the posts about Firefox and the problems that we have supporting Internet Explorer. Would it be an idea to suggest that Wikimedia is best experienced with Firefox / Opera / .. I am myself a fan of Firefox, it really increases my productivity using two screens with 9 tabs on average. That is what the Firefox experience is for me :) Seriously though, when we do not allow MP3, would it not make equally good sense to suggest that our content is best experienced not using IE ?? Needless to say, we would continue the support for IE !!
It only needs to be a small statement on our main page or on our user portal ...
Thanks, GerardM
Hello,
There is an effort to spread firefox usage at: http://www.spreadfirefox.com/
Basicly the idea is to ask people to put a firefox banner on their website and track the number of click and downloaded firefox through the banner. Material is available with source code at: http://www.spreadfirefox.com/community/?q=affiliates/homepage
Wikipedia being NPOV I don't think we should enter the war. Moreover saying "this site is best seen with firefox / opera" will just mean to IE users that we are lazy webmasters that didn't want to put any effort in supporting multi browsers (which is false, ask gwicke about css tweaking).
So basicly, it's a good idea for freeness, but bad for NPOV :o)
Ashar Voultoiz wrote:
Gerard Meijssen wrote:
<snip>
I have read the posts about Firefox and the problems that we have supporting Internet Explorer. Would it be an idea to suggest that Wikimedia is best experienced with Firefox / Opera / .. I am myself a fan of Firefox, it really increases my productivity using two screens with 9 tabs on average. That is what the Firefox experience is for me :) Seriously though, when we do not allow MP3, would it not make equally good sense to suggest that our content is best experienced not using IE ?? Needless to say, we would continue the support for IE !!
It only needs to be a small statement on our main page or on our user portal ...
Thanks, GerardM
Hello,
There is an effort to spread firefox usage at: http://www.spreadfirefox.com/
Basicly the idea is to ask people to put a firefox banner on their website and track the number of click and downloaded firefox through the banner. Material is available with source code at: http://www.spreadfirefox.com/community/?q=affiliates/homepage
Wikipedia being NPOV I don't think we should enter the war. Moreover saying "this site is best seen with firefox / opera" will just mean to IE users that we are lazy webmasters that didn't want to put any effort in supporting multi browsers (which is false, ask gwicke about css tweaking).
So basicly, it's a good idea for freeness, but bad for NPOV :o)
When comparing Firefox and IE, many things can be said that are not POV. Firefox has better and more functionality, it has shown itself to be more responsive compared to IE regarding fixing known security issues. An US-American governmental organisation has suggested not to use IE because of its security issues. Firefox is more compliant to standards. Contrary to other organisaations who are not capable enough to create standard comformant web-sites, we do support IE.
As you only quote part of my mail, one reason that is left out is; we support .ogg sound files and we do not *allow* .mp3 files. This is because we want to promote open standards. Supporting open standards is exactly what we achieve when we promote Firefox. When one of the leading websites (us) informs the public that there is something good over the horizon ... Why would we not support browsers who are better standards compliant ??
Yes, I know spreadfirefox; 2 million downloads in 10 days :) So many more to go..
Thanks, GerardM
Ashar-
Wikipedia being NPOV I don't think we should enter the war. Moreover saying "this site is best seen with firefox / opera" will just mean to IE users that we are lazy webmasters that didn't want to put any effort in supporting multi browsers (which is false, ask gwicke about css tweaking).
Agreed. However, we should prominently state that Wikimedia is best viewed using a browser that supports web standards A, B, C and D. We could then have an information page (table) that shows which browser supports which standards.
The problem with the browser monopoly is that Microsoft can exercise control over standards. It is this control which matters to us and to everyone else, and making people aware of that fact is perfectly fair and neutral. We should give our readers the necessary information to take control. As long as Microsoft supports all these standards, everything is fine and they will have an "X" in all the table columns.
In the near future, SVG should be one of these standards - as soon as it becomes part of the mainline builds for Firefox and Mozilla. SVG is really important to enable things like animations (without non-scalable and 256- color limited GIFs) and interactive timelines. The current timelines are nice, but SVG makes them zoomable and adds potential for other features which you find in timeline systems of CD-ROM encyclopedias. Note that basic SVGs are already generated, if you view the image for a timeline you can substitute ".png" in the URL with ".svg".
XForms may also provide us with some benefits, although that is probably of more interest to Wikidata where form entry verification is desirable. Switching to full XHTML will be important if we ever want to add WYSIWYG support, as it will enable us to convert back and forth between wiki- syntax and XHTML.
I have no idea what Microsoft's long term plans are for these standards. See, I'm perfectly neutral. ;-)
Regards,
Erik
Ashar Voultoiz wrote:
Wikipedia being NPOV I don't think we should enter the war. Moreover saying "this site is best seen with firefox / opera" will just mean to IE users that we are lazy webmasters that didn't want to put any effort in supporting multi browsers (which is false, ask gwicke about css tweaking).
How about something along the lines "Due to security concerns with the Internet Explorer (viruses disguised as images) we recommend that you use another browser."? For IE users only of course, and only on pages with images ;-)
See, perfectly neutral!
Magnus
On Thu, 30 Sep 2004 00:25:17 +0200, Gerard Meijssen gerardm@myrealbox.com wrote:
Hoi, To celebrate the 5000th word of nl:wiktionary, I have uploaded 100 .ogg files to Commons. These are Dutch words pronounced by me. While doing this excercise, I have written a blurp about sound and how to handle it on Wikimedia. The piece is still in Dutch, it is still in nl:wiktionary, but I have asked the nl:wikipedia crowd to review it. When this is done, I will translate it in English and post it in Meta ? en:Wikipedia ? Please let me know..
No need to translate: if its for the whole of Wikimedia, it should go on meta: somewhere, and people can translate, discuss, translate discussions, etc. That's what it's for. Now, where is it at the moment.. aha, found it: http://nl.wiktionary.org/wiki/WikiWoordenboek:Geluid am I right?
From what I can gather (I know no Dutch, but English+German gives me a
good start), this so far covers adding sounds far better than it covers accessing them. I was thinking about how to do this, and I came to the conclusion that we really need *two* help pages: one to answer "Help! How do I make this sound play?" and one to answer "How can I contribute sounds to Wikimedia?"
I'm going to hash out some of my ideas on this at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Multimedia; please join me.
wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org