Enlarge / When Google, whose Chromium/Chrome-related browsers make up 80% of browser share, says that something has "not enough interest from the entire ecosystem," what does that mean, exactly? (credit: Aurich Lawson)

Chrome developers' decision to remove support for a compressed image format that Google helped develop is just another sign of "the disturbing amount of control" the ad company has over browsers and the web, according to the Free Software Foundation (FSF).

In a statement , Greg Farough, campaigns manager at the FSF, took aim at Google's stated reason for deprecating support for the JPEG XL image format , which was based on Google's PIK format . A Google engineer, commenting on the JPEG XL issue tracker on Chromium, Chrome's open source core project, wrote that "there is not enough interest from the entire ecosystem to continue experimenting with JPEG XL." The format also "does not bring sufficient incremental benefits over existing formats," and removing it "reduces the maintenance burden," the engineer wrote.

"Putting aside the problematic aspects of the term 'ecosystem' when you yourself are by far the largest and most dangerous predator in said 'ecosystem,'" Farough wrote (adding his own link). "In supposedly gauging what the 'ecosystem' wants, all Google is really doing is asking itself what Google wants."

Enlarge / Mui Labs' Mui Board 2nd Gen embodies the loftiest promise of Matter: a wooden board, from a company you've likely never heard of, controlling devices made by many different companies, even if they're already connected to other apps. (credit: Mui)

First came the specification , then the release , and then CES 2023—it has been a busy few months for Matter, the smart home connectivity standard. You can't quite fill your home just yet with Matter-ready devices, but there are some intriguing options in development. Here's a look at some of the most practical, quirky, and viable gear coming soon (or soon-ish).

Some parts of Matter are already here

If you wanted to start your smart home off fresh this year with a focus on Matter-powered universal compatibility, you already have a couple pieces of the puzzle ready for you. Let's go bit by bit, starting with your phone.

Your phone, whether iOS or Android , can, right now, scan the QR code or read the Bluetooth signal of a Matter-certified device. Most platforms support adding devices to a controller through an Android app, but only Apple's HomeKit and Samsung's SmartThings have support for iOS device enrollment . Amazon has said it plans to add iOS enrollment for Thread-based devices this spring but already supports devices over Wi-Fi.

Enlarge / Matter promises to make smart home devices work with any control system you want to use, securely. This marketing image also seems to promise an intriguing future involving smart mid-century modern chairs and smart statement globes. (credit: CSA)

The specification for Matter 1.0 was released on Tuesday—all 899 pages of it . More importantly, smart home manufacturers and software makers can now apply for this cross-compatibility standard, have their products certified for it, and release them. What does that mean for you, the person who actually buys and deals with this stuff?

At the moment, not much. If you have smart home devices set up, some of them might start working with Matter soon, either through firmware upgrades to devices or hubs. If you're deciding whether to buy something now, you might want to wait to see if it's slated to work with Matter. The first devices with a Matter logo on the box could appear in as little as a month. Amazon, Google, Apple, and Samsung's SmartThings division have all said they're ready to update their core products with Matter compatibility when they can.

That's how Matter will arrive, but what does Matter do? You have questions, and we've got... well, not definitive answers, but information and scenarios. This is a gigantic standards working group trying to keep things moving across both the world's largest multinational companies and esoteric manufacturers of tiny circuit boards. It's a whole thing. But we'll try to answer some self-directed questions to provide some clarity.

Dennis Schubert: ActivityPub - Final thoughts, one year later.

Maybe Diaspora could be re-implemented using XMPP? :-)

I would like to hold XMPP up as an example, here. If you do not know XMPP, it is short for Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol, a protocol for building distributed instant messaging applications. While extensibility was so important they even made it part of the protocol’s name, they did not want to end up with a runaway specification that depends on having implementers talk to each other to be working reliably.

Instead, they wrote a very strict base set of the absolute minimums required to build on XMPP, and pushed that through the IETF’s standards track, ending up with what is now RFC 6120. Acknowledging that they can never address all needs in such a strict specification document, they opened themselves for more flexibility:

This document specifies how clients connect to servers and specifies the basic semantics of XML stanzas. However, this document does not define the “payloads” of the XML stanzas that might be exchanged once a connection is successfully established; instead, those payloads are defined by various XMPP extensions. For example, [XMPP-IM] defines extensions for basic instant messaging and presence functionality. In addition, various specifications produced in the XSF’s XEP series [XEP-0001] define extensions for a wide range of applications.

They introduced XEPs, XMPP Extensions Protocols. The very first XEP ever published, XEP-0001, describes the process of getting a new XEP published to the world, and that process of that is not very hard to understand or tricky to follow. Everyone is invited to submit a proposal, you do not have to be a member of any organization, and in fact, you do not even need to maintain your own implementation. As long as your proposal follows the rules and matches the required format, it will be taken into consideration. After a proposal has been made, there is a specific chain of events, but it boils down to an open discussion on those proposals, and if there are no more doubts or things to improve, and if people agree that the proposal would be a useful thing to standardize, the proposal will eventually end up as an actual XEP.

At the time of writing, there are 151 active, draft, experimental, final, or proposed XEPs, and all of them can be found on the XMPP Standards Foundation’s website. Everyone interested in reading up on those topics, for example because they want to implement a client or a server, can find those documents there, and there is also a central infrastructure for asking questions and proposing improvements, which is open to everyone. This way, the XSF has ensured XMPP can be extended to all imaginable use cases, without ending up with watered-down or vague specifications.

If, for example, I wanted to implement an XMPP server or a client4, I could read the relevant RFCs as well as the XEPs that are relevant to my project. Some documents, like XEP-0387 for example, would even help me out deciding which XEPs are essential, by listing the things that are important when building a web client, or an advanced desktop client, or a mobile application, … There would be no need for me to talk to other XMPP server or client implementers for my implementation to work, and I could be very comfortable about the interoperability of my systems if I built them in accordance to the specifications. That is what specifications are meant to be.

#activitypub #diaspora #standards #xmpp #movim #salutatoi #xep