The irresistible rise of JQuery

Last month a survey on W3Techs determined that the JavaScript library jQuery is being used by over half of all websites. This is a rise of 40% over a year and, according to the survey, means that a top website was adding JQuery every four minutes. Those fades, slides, calendars, form checks you see (and probably use on your sites) come from this amazing set of code. It stems from a software engineer named John Resig, who wrote about using Selectors in JavaScript almost exactly seven years ago. (See last month's item in the Register.)

I was very sceptical about JavaScript when it first emerged. It seemed to be an attempt to mix functionality with markup that harked back to earlier multimedia days: and many people turned it off in their browsers. Now that web-wizards are routinely separating form from content in web pages, and using CSS to deal with the form, JavaScript makes its stunning comeback. As it's an interpreted, if often arcane, scripting language it's easy to learn from others and freely distribute code.

What are the advantages of using Javascript-only versus using JQuery-only? That's a question asked on the Programmer Blog only a couple of days ago. The answers are interesting and make points that apply to libraries in general - such as the load overhead (you'll probably not be using all the library so you're loading unnecessary code but if you load from Google then it'll probably already be in the user's browser) - and some advantages of JQuery, notably the gentle learning curve. I'd add the open/free nature of it, particularly when compared with Flash.

Web designer depot looks at the the Good the Bad and the Ugly of JQuery (with some useful comments too). The author, Richard Lawson, makes the point that "John Resig and the other developers behind the jQuery project genuinely understand the time/money equation that faces web developers on a daily basis".

I should also remind you of the venerable CSS Zen Garden, if we're talking about form vs function. It's been around for a long time (and is expecting CSS1) but basically has a set piece of marked-up content and you're invited to add your own CSS to change the look. It's a neat demonstration of a key principle.

Open => Movies

A friend in Canada sent me a DVD at Christmas. It was a little different to your average DVD in that it contained another example of an open movie, and a very fine one too. But it's an open movie with a cautionary tale attached.

I'll get the good stuff out of the way first. It's called Sita Sings the Blues and tells a story from the ancient Hindu epic, the Ramayana, about the failure of Sita's marriage to Rama and its aftermath. This is juxtaposed with the breakup of another marriage; that of the film's maker Nina Paley. Sita is a goddess separated from her beloved Lord and husband Rama. Nina is an animator whose husband moves to India, then dumps her by email.

It's an amazing film; moving, witty and beautiful. It also includes some lovely music, most notably songs sung by a lady named Annette Hanshaw, on shellac 78s from the 1920s and 30s.

Nina has released this movie under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike licence. As she says on the movie home page, "From the shared culture it came, and back into the shared culture it goes." The reason I'm mentioning it here (other than that I really want you to watch this movie) is to remind you of how convoluted and counter-intuitive copyrights can sometimes be ... especially in music.

Those of you who have been on our course or read the book will no doubt recall that I explain that a recording of a song contains two different copyrights; one for the recording and one for the song itself. In most cases the copyright in a sound recording expires 50 years after it is first published but that other copyright continues until 70 years after the death of the longest-lived composer or lyricist. Nina wasn't aware of this until after she had completed the movie and had to apply for licences from the music publishers retrospectively even though the recordings were out of copyright; never an easy task. She achieved this but it cost her - personally - $50 thousand. The publishers, on the other hand, may have been tied into contracts with their composers that restricted their room for manoeuvre (although they did drop their original fees from over $200K!). I should also add that including music in a movie or TV program involves a thing called the synchronisation right, which is different from the mechanical right which allowed the recording to be made in the first place, and the performance right which would allow it to be played in public.

So Nina has paid personally to allow us to download or stream the movie for our own personal use. It's right there up to 1080p HD resolution ... donations accepted.

While we're discussing open movies, have I mentioned the Blender Foundation to you before? Blender is a very powerful open-source animation package. Someday I really want to get to grips with it. The organisation behind it - based in free-spirited Amsterdam - have made some movie 'shorts' to show it off. There are three so far and they are also really worth a look. They are released under another Creative Commons licence, this time the Attribution one. Elephants Dream is a surreal journey inside a giant machine, Big Buck Bunny is Rambo meets Disney (sort of) with rendered fur ... and Sintel is a cautionary tale about a search for a pet dragon (with fast action). Each movie tests another feature of the software.

You can find the three on Blender's Open Projects page.

My and finally is to ponder whether there is a way of explaining the intricacies of intellectual property (like copyright) so that anyone stands a chance of understanding it. Now that almost everyone is using and creating and publishing (over the internet), rights are no longer something for experts and companies: they directly affect everyone. Maybe we need some kind of Highway Code for copyright. What do you think?

Open != Absolutely free

The organisation who handle licensing for MPEG, MPEG-LA, have announced that they will not charge royalties on using MPEG4 encoders ever. This is an extension of their earlier stance which had a time limit.

I think this is very good news, but my somewhat vocal encouragement of MPEG-LA in this direction (through BIMA) did surprise some people. One very senior person in the MPEG fraternity thought I believed that the owners of MPEG shouldn't receive recompense for their efforts. But this misinterprets my perspective, which I see in the larger context of the value chain for creative tools of any kind.

The announcement from MPEG-LA means that you will never have to pay royalties to encode your movies using MPEG4 and put them on the internet. Anyone making an encoder or decoder will still have to do so, and presumably so will broadcasters using MPEG4 for digital TV, as does HDTV in the UK. This seems fair. I likened it to to Kodak selling me film and Nikon selling me a camera but not having any financial interest in the photographs I took. I think it goes without saying that any standard will only succeed if people use it, and being open is a big step towards that.

One current argument over the meaning of open is that between supporters of Flash and those of HTML5, which usually stems from Apple not allowing Flash on the iPhone.

The BBC's Erik Huggers recently discussed this on a blog and illustrated the BBC's support for open standards by referring to DVB, Digital Video Broadcasting, which is the specification behind digital TV. This does seem to have caused some confusion as open standards are not necessarily the same as the use of the word open when talking about software like Apache or PHP (see comment 9 on that BBC blog page). It's getting back to money again, because you probably have to pay a licence fee to use open standards like DVB, whereas you don't pay to use open source software such as Apache or PHP. The key word in the definition of open standards is actually nondiscriminatory, meaning that everyone pays (or doesn't pay) a fee on the same basis. It might not be the same fee because that might depend on the size of the organisation (for example), but anyone can join the party. It's also worth adding that in many cases (including DVB) the money from licences is used only to support the development of the standard.

So we have a triumvirate of proprietary/open standards/open source from which to choose, often for the same kind of thing and sometimes for exactly the same software. How are your companies addressing this question? Is HTML5 the new sliced bread?