Free, Libre, and Open Source Software and Standards Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Dec 22, 2025

• Linuxiac ☛ Ventoy 1.1.10 Released With Wayland Fixes and musl libc Support

  One of the most notable changes is the added support for musl libc environments in the Ventoy2Disk.sh installer script, which improves usability on lightweight and non-glibc distributions.

• Linuxiac ☛ Darktable 5.4 RAW Photo Editing Tool Released

  Darktable, a powerful open-source photography workflow application designed primarily for RAW photo processing and non-destructive editing, has officially released version 5.4 as a new feature update, bringing significant changes to image processing, workflow handling, and platform support.

• Linuxiac ☛ MPV 0.41 Media Player Switches to GPU-Next Renderer

  The most notable change is the switch to libplacebo-based gpu-next as the default video output, replacing the long-standing gpu backend. This move improves color accuracy, HDR handling, and future extensibility, while aligning mpv more closely with modern graphics APIs.

  As part of this transition, Vulkan hardware decoding is now preferred when available, ahead of other decoding backends.

• George Robinson ☛ Kafka is hard

  For simple use cases where you have low volume, where a total order of records doesn't matter, or where records can be produced to any partition, using Kafka is as easy as producing records at one end and consuming them at the other end.

  Where Kafka becomes hard is when you have any of the following requirements: [...]

• Standards/Consortia

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ NIST warns several of its Internet Time Service servers may be inaccurate due to a power outage — Boulder servers 'no longer have an accurate time reference'

    The warning specifically names the affected hosts as time-a-b.nist.gov through time-e-b.nist.gov, along with ntp-b.nist.gov, which is used for authenticated NTP. NIST cautioned that while the servers may still respond to network requests, they may not be referencing a valid or accurate time source. The agency said it may take those hosts offline entirely to prevent the risk of distributing incorrect time to clients.

  • [Old] ESR ☛ The HTML Hell Page

    "Okay," I hear you saying, "so you've given me good advice on how not to screw up. Have you got anything more positive to say? Like, good things to do and how I can improve my page?" For you, my friend, I have three words. Content, content, and content. Give the audience a reason to care. Too many web pages are like tales told by idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Do you want to be interesting? Then forget the graphics and the glitz. First and foremost, have something to say.

  • Manuel Matuzović ☛ Don't leave the screen reader hungry - HTMHell

    Visually, it looked decorative and kind of like a sandwich. But screen readers don't read an emoji as decoration, they announce its Unicode character name. So screen reader users heard: "Sandwiches, Burrito."

    That little emoji isn't just sitting in your markup looking pretty. It's making promises your website can't keep. One tiny flourish in your heading tag and suddenly your sandwich bar sounds like a taqueria.

  • Manuel Matuzović ☛ Forms are a badly designed part of HTML - HTMHell

    Forms were likely one of the reasons why browser vendors joined forces in the WHATWG in 2004. They felt that HTML standardization was heading into the wrong direction and wanted more practical relevance. While this may be an oversimplification, if true, it highlights the failure of the WHATWG (i.e., the browser vendors) and, subsequently, the W3C. Although the newly standardized form elements and features all point into the right direction, they are incomplete and unfinished. The fact that this is still the case, even more than ten years after HTML5 became a recommendation, is alarming. I will concentrate in this article on forms and especially on missing elements, inconsistent behaviour and the problems with styling.

  • Manuel Matuzović ☛ Semantics beyond the tag name - HTMHell

    Once you’ve recovered from that devastating realization, we can proceed.

    To actually write semantic HTML, we need to know what elements mean beyond just what we infer from their tag names and how to use them. So, how do we find that out?

  • Manuel Matuzović ☛ The many lives of the page title - HTMHell

    For screen reader users the page title is among the first things announced. On page load, sighted users will most likely first notice the H1 heading. When coming from another application or browser tab, the page title helps us identify the right window or browser tab. A page title identifies or describes a page and as such reassures us that we are indeed on the chosen page.

  • Manuel Matuzović ☛ Styling by Language: Using the lang Attribute for Multilingual Design - HTMHell

    If you’ve ever built a bilingual English – Japanese website, you know the struggle. English uses letters with ascenders, descenders, and varying widths. Japanese, on the other hand, mixes three scripts: kanji, hiragana, and katakana, each forming balanced, square-like characters.

    Already last year, I told you about a special HTML element that you can use to style this scripts. Read my post HTML and CSS I didn't even know about before I started creating content.