You know, when Mitchell Baker posted her newest missive, talking about Thunderbird making its own nest in the future, I reacted much the way I expected (and now see) others would react: with disappointment. Although this time, I decided I’d wait a little before commenting. The last time I spoke my mind, I regretted it because I’d misunderstood what Mitchell was actually saying.

I think that’s happening again. Rather than bash Mitchell again, I’m coming to her defense this time – because I think people are bashing her too hard.

It’s difficult for me to articulate my feelings on this. On the one hand, what Mitchell and Brendan are doing make sense. The browser is the priority because that’s what people demand the most of. On the other hand, we want mail/news, we want authoring, we want music, we want debugging, we want all kinds of things.

You may notice something about the links I posted above: with the (current) exception of Mozilla Thunderbird, the products under development or currently available to meet these needs don’t come from the Mozilla Foundation. I mean, think about it: just how much do you expect Mozilla to do? Would you really want one organization to do everything, or one organization to have you do everything their way? We have enough companies with aspirations to exactly that right now – Microsoft, Google, and Oracle come to mind. (So does FSF.) Maybe this move is actually a good thing.

The simple fact is, software development is a hard task. It takes years to learn how to do it right – and even then, colossal blunders can be made. The active contributors to a project even of Mozilla’s size is always changing, but it’s never enough. Some people leave, others come aboard, but we’re chronically swamped. Plus, in my case and that of many other developers, we go after the bugs that interest us or annoy us the most. In other words, to get me to fix the bugs you care about, often you have to convince me why your bug is more important and more immediate than mine. Which, I have to admit, is pretty hard to do, since I have a lot of things I want to work on. (The exception to this is keeping a roof over my head, which is a separate discussion.)

The best solution might be to guide people towards getting their hands dirty

. As I said, we’re chronically swamped as developers. We could certainly use a little help – not in telling us what’s important (since we hear that all the time), but in actually fixing the important bugs. Perhaps we should promote a new philosophy towards bugs: “How can we help you to fix this?” In other words, empower the community a little more by directly involving them in the process of bug fixing.

The nature of open source says any one person – or organization – can work on anything they choose. By implication, that which no one chooses to work on will not change. The Mozilla Foundation has made its choices, and if you think about the implications of Microsoft-style “we can do everything, better” attitudes, it might be the right decision. Our complaining about it, though, does little to help the situation. The right solution is to work on the problems that confront you, whether technical or not. There’s no reason to make this a popular battle and become a lobbyist, begging for others to change their minds.

For the last few days at work, I’ve been ruefully thinking that I was spoiled by learning how to write C++ code for Mozilla, instead of generic C++ code. Maybe the same is happening here: we’ve been spoiled by the ideals of what Mozilla (the name) stands for, and relying on that a little too much. The original Mozilla attitude was not standing up to anyone or against anyone, but standing up for yourself and getting things done. We who use these products on a daily basis need to recapture that attitude.

My favorite t-shirt says it best:

hack
this technology could fall into the right hands

I promised shaver that I would retract my words if I had misinterpreted XULRunner 1.9 executables being unavailable. Today, I gladly do so, as bsmedberg indicates yes, they will be available:

Make sure that prepackaged XULRunner builds are available.

That’s all I was asking for. Now we just need better docs (something we’ve been complaining about long before we complained about a GRE..

. 😉 ) Would someone please pass the salt?

My apologies to everyone for flying off the deep end earlier.

I’ve noticed a recurring theme here: those who say we can’t put out a XULRunner 1.9 are saying it’s because we need system-level integration: one XULRunner instance supporting several applications on the same machine at the same time, I think

. This is the JRE runtime model I’ve seen a couple people throw around.

I want to throw out a radical idea: what if we simply dropped that requirement for 1.9?

Simply put, I think it’s a nice-to-have convenience, but I as an application developer do not need it. If that’s the primary point of contention preventing a XULRunner build being blessed as 1.9, maybe we can have our cake and eat it too.

Perhaps we simply need to ask a better question: What does the community need, and what can they live without?

XULRunner 1.9 is dead

For the last several days, I have been watching the discussion about Firefox versus XULRunner with some amusement, and without making any blog posts of my own. That stopped today with Mitchell Baker’s official policy statement. As Chief Lizard Wrangler, she does have the authority to do this.

I also want to state that I understand the rationale for the decision, and from the Mozilla Foundation’s point of view, the decision is entirely sensible. I don’t like it, but I accept it.

(For the record, I’m going to refrain from making more posts about the discussion unless I have something of value to say, something which will offer proposals or solutions. Several others who have blogged about it have merely been complaining or expressing their opinion. I don’t see that as productive – even less so now that Mitchell’s made her call. I would encourage my fellow platform enthusiasts to propose improvements now to benefit the community, and to work with the Mozilla Foundation in every way possible. We don’t need any more acrimony over this subject.)

The significant part of her statement, for me, is this:

The Mozilla Foundation does not plan to invest in a pre-packaged or stand-alone XULRunner at this time. We plan to re-evaluate this as we approach the release of Mozilla 2.

My response to that? OUCH.

Seriously, this hurts. A lot. With that one statement, the burden on me as an application developer, long-term, has just gone up. Verbosio development has proceeded on the assumption — reflected in the original XULRunner roadmap — that there would be an official XULRunner 1.9 platform release. Now, like everyone else, I’ll be forced to build executables, or telling users to build their own off some GECKO_1_9_RELEASE source tag. What makes this particularly painful is I do not have the resources of a corporate organization – no QA, no docs people, nothing.

It also lowers the priority on other platform-specific bugs to “ehh, we’ll get to it someday.” Bugs for things like toolkit extensions. Want Venkman or Firebug in your app? Build it yourself! You’re a developer, you can do it. And if we ever update those in our source, build it yourself again. This is part and parcel of software development. Deal with it.

Which leads me to my next thoughts: damage control. MoCo’s made their decision. Fine.
That’s their right, and I strongly suggest that anyone trying to fight it is helping entropy. (Consult Diane Duane’s “Support Your Local Wizard” series for an explanation why this is a Bad Thing.) I’m not happy with the decision, but it’s been made.

Long live XULRunner! (In another form)

Recently the AllPeers blog suggested an official Mozilla Platform User Group (Mozpad). I think this is a fine alternative, and given the opportunity, I would participate heavily in such a group. If a community arises to produce and support XULRunner 1.9 builds, fantastic. We would probably have to create our own Addons service akin to AMO – if MoCo won’t support XR 1.9, why support XR 1.9 extensions? – but I would resist forking XR 1.9 code itself in even the tiniest detail unless it became absolutely necessary.

Mozilla 2.0 versus the X-Men

There’s also another thought I want to express: what’s going to happen with the current 1.x series of code after Firefox 3?

It’s generally accepted work on Mozilla 2 will begin in earnest after Fx3’s release. Wonderful. Of course, nobody knows how long it will be until Mozilla 2 is remotely usable or stable enough for dogfood development. This presents a problem which I’ve talked about on IRC, but has not been mentioned on any weblog or in any official capacity.

Suppose Mozilla 2 takes a long, long time. 18 months is a long time in software development, and of course there’s no release date set in stone for that either. Mozilla 2 is the future, but I wouldn’t bet on anybody keeping to any posted deadline for it. Mozilla 1.0 took a lot longer than anyone thought it would, remember.

So what happens with the 1.x trunk line of code on CVS? (I have no reason to doubt there will be security & maintenance of the 1.9 branch – MoCo would be fools not to do that.) No one’s talked about that, and I think it’s time someone did in an official manner. Any number of things could happen:

• Trunk is permanently closed on CVS, and commits to it will not be accepted.
• Trunk is renamed as the 1.9 branch, and check-ins are appropriately restricted.
• Review requirements for the 1.x series change: check-ins will still be allowed, but under different rules than we have now. No official 1.10 release will ever be made, nor any 1.10 alphas.
• No changes to 1.x series commits

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  . No official 1.10 release will ever be made, no 1.10 alphas.

• A community forms to sponsor and drive 1.x series commits and reviews, while MoCo maintains a 1.9 branch and the new 2.0 code base. The community would decide on 1.10 releases, but there would be no official branding or endorsement of 1.10+ series products from MoCo. Nor would there be any Firefox, Thunderbird, etc. releases from 1.10+ series code.

This last option appeals to me most, particularly in light of the above XULRunner apps discussion. Think Apache 1.x versus Apache 2.x. Both are still out there, even though Apache 2 has long since superseded Apache 1.

… and our own Phoenix

The simplest solution to everything I’ve talked about in this article might be that a XULRunner community adopts the 1.x trunk for a theoretical 1.10+ code base. This has a bit of elegance to me, in that the XR community could do whatever they wanted to 1.10 code, and check in changes which benefit the community in the short term while we wait for Mozilla 2. The community could then use some odd product name (“Genesis”, “Foundation”, “Ringworld”, “Protomatter”, etc.) for their own project. (I like “Protomatter”, myself.)

I think I’ll end this editorial with one last thought reiterating something I said earlier. Please don’t take my blog as a venue for complaining about XR 1.9 being vaporware. I’m not interested in that. XULRunner app builders now perceive a problem, and whether or not that problem is real, the worst thing we XR users can do is complain about it. The best thing we can do is start a discussion about “What do we do now?”. That’s what I want this blog entry to be about, and that’s what comments I will approve on this entry. If you want to gripe about it without offering a solution, do it on your own blogs. 🙂

Due to some issues with my ISP at home, I’ve temporarily shut off images in my Firefox installation. It doesn’t take long for me to realize just how much I appreciate them, especially at the level of little icons.

It actually causes some readability issues. For instance, on CNN.com, the image alternate text is larger than the size of the icon in many respects. (Note: Another instance occurs in my weblog, where I can’t see the “Logout” link in the page where I’m writing this very entry!)

To really get the feel for it, I think the web community at large should pick a day (say, April 30, two weeks hence), where advanced users turn off their image browsing for that day and see how it impacts their day-to-day operations. In particular, web designers could take a look at their own pages with images off. Looking at other websites, well, please be polite and considerate of the site designers. This is a suggested evangelism effort.

Note I’m excluding image hosting websites and image “portals” (for which the lack of images would defeat their whole purpose of existence). So don’t yell at me about the Hubble Space Telescope. Your favorite web comics should probably be excluded for the same reason. In short, where a picture or image is the overall goal, there’s no point in getting upset about it.

Is this an unrealistic request in the days of broadband Internet access? I don’t think so, since a large percentage of the public still use dial-up (NetZero, PeoplePC anyone?) Images eat bandwidth – not as much as movies, of course, but still a sizable portion.

What do you think, as a member of the community at large? I just think it’s worth taking a survey of the Web, and seeing it how we used to ten years ago, as we downloaded images

. Just how much do we rely on them now, and is it too much?

Died on Christmas Day, shortly before 5:30 p.m

. PST, 2006.

We’ll miss you, Grandpa. Another one of the Greatest Generation, for whom we now play Taps.

This is a two-part article. Please bear with me.

“Why do you keep trying?”

A few weeks ago, I started asking myself this question about Verbosio. If you factor in the time I spent on Abacus (and I do), I have been at this off-and-on project for about four years now, with nothing of real value to show for that time. This is a depressing state of affairs.

I can only answer that question with, “Because there’s no tools I know of to do the job better.” Specifically, to give me UI’s for editing XML documents with language-specific tools (XUL, XBL, RDF, MathML, XHTML, SVG, etc., etc.). It was true four years ago, and it’s still true now.

Think about it: how cool would it be to have an application that came, out of the box, with the following options under its File menu:

• New Document…
  • XHTML
  • XUL Window
  • XUL Dialog
  • XUL Overlay
  • XBL 1
• New Document Pack…
  • XULRunner Application

You fill out a simple form, and there it is. Plus, you have language-specific buttons for editing the document in a given language (XUL), and it’s easy to switch to another language (CSS, even though it’s not XML).

Or, if you want to add MathML, you drop in a MathML extension, and restart… and MathML is now enabled for editing.

Right now, I still don’t know of any tools that can really do this. I’ve always intended Verbosio as a platform for doing this. After four years, though, I begin to lose faith, encouraged only by the fact that I perceive a real need for it.

The WWW is not living up to its (literary) potential

Many people blame Internet Explorer for this. Yes, it still has a monopoly stranglehold on browsing the Internet, and yes, IE7 is bringing some improvements, but not enough. But those who blame IE and Microsoft alone are only looking at a small piece of the problem.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee believes we need a Semantic Web, and I’m not entirely sure I disagree with him on that. But even so, this doesn’t address other problems with the Web we have now, including the focus of this article.

The World Wide Web Consortium has put out dozens of Recommendations, many of them talking about XML languages such as those mentioned above. XML is a Big Thing, and not going anywhere. What we can do with XML, and specifically certain XML languages, is truly astonishing.

Creating XML documents with those languages in the first place, though…

Fundamentally, that’s what Verbosio is about. Sure, tools for generating HTML are everywhere, and it’s relatively easy to convert HTML to XHTML most of the time. But what about MathML, or SVG at the same time? RDF? How can you create the content flexibly through a GUI?

(Note: Please spare me the snide remarks suggesting a text editor. Text editors are just about the most inefficient way to create XML markup that there is.)

The simple fact is, tools to create such rich XML markup are not widely known and available. I truly and honestly believe this holds the WWW in the year 2000 more than Microsoft and Internet Explorer do.

While browsing the WWW has improved dramatically (Firefox, Opera, Safari, Camino, etc.), and e-mail has had similar improvements (Thunderbird, and forgive me for forgetting the other major e-mail clients out there with frequent releases), that simply means the ability to read the WWW has improved. No corresponding improvements to writing the WWW have been nearly as widespread.

The old Composer application, as it belonged to Netscape (when Netscape was a real company a decade ago), and later Mozilla, was a critical success at providing HTML editing capability. I dream of a similarly successful rich XML editor at my fingertips. ETNA may be that solution. Verbosio may be that solution. Or it may be something else. Amaya isn’t quite that solution, but it’s good for its purposes. A tool allowing me to edit XHTML, MathML, SVG, RDF, etc. simultaneously through a GUI that makes me think I’m editing XHTML, MathML, SVG, RDF, etc. instead of making me think I’m editing vanilla XML, is a tool desperately needed.

I’ve said before I work for ManyOne Networks, and two of our sponsored projects are the Digital Universe and the Encyclopedia of Earth

. When you get down to it, though, these sites are about hosting and linking to accurate content. The better tools there are to edit said content, the better the experiences of our customers will be. In this respect, it’s fortunate for me to work at ManyOne Networks. They want to offer content and content services, and I want to offer content editing services.

The World Wide Web is a fantastic creation; without it, you’d likely not be reading these words. But even now, the blogging software I’m using to write this article can’t let me easily create artwork. We can see the artwork just fine. But no one can appreciate that which has not been drawn.

Until that day comes, I fear even blog articles will be restricted mainly to the realm of hypertext and digital camera pictures. We can read so much more than we can write that we don’t even know what we can read or write. It really is time to put pen to paper, instead of just reading everyone else’s papers which are no more capable than our own.

About a month ago, I bought a bicycle and trailer

. I loved the pair – they went together like peanut butter and jelly. I didn’t use the trailer much – I bought it to move my laundry from home to the laundromat and back. So often I’d leave it at my place while I took the bike to work.

Last Thursday, that trailer was stolen from my motel in Santa Cruz, CA.

It cost me $150.00. I’m really bummed out about it, because it was such a useful tool. The lesson for me is to keep little things like that locked up.

To the thief: I don’t know who you are, or why you took it, but I hope you would return it. I’ve notified the Santa Cruz Police Department, and I’ve notified the bike shop that it came from (they say it’s the only one they’ve ever sold, and that no other bike shop in Santa Cruz carries that line of trailers). I’ve even put in a prayer on your behalf. It was a nice little black trailer, and I do need it. If you have a heart (and you still have the trailer or can get it back), I’d really appreciate having it back, even anonymously – but preferably in good working order.

Also, for those of you familiar with the Bible: I do forgive, but I do press charges if it’s not returned by the thief.

I rarely blog about non-technical issues here, and even more rarely about non-mozilla.org stuff. I have to say something, though, about the film Al Gore has recently starred in, “An Inconvenient Truth”.

Go. Watch. This. Film.

I liked the film – it’s raising a challenge for all of us. Personally, there’s not much more I feel I can do directly to reduce my impact (I ride a bike, walk, and take the bus just about everywhere except when I’m visiting my parents – I don’t own a car and don’t want one, thank you very much). About the only idea I have would be to start putting holes in paper bags again, so I can stick them on my bike’s handles the same way I do for plastic bags

. But that becomes a problem for businesses, convincing them that it’s a Good Idea to carry special paper bags.

Now, if only tickets to the film were tax-deductible. (Hey, it’s Al Gore, right?) 🙂

I’m asleep with music playing in the background from Music Choice’s “Soundscapes” channel (New Age music, very relaxing). I hear a song that’s so good and so unusual I find it impossible to ignore. (Kevin Wood, “Harmonic Oasis”, on his “Scenic Listening” album.) Songs like this are why I bought Blue Man Group’s two CD’s when I first had the chance. (For them, it was “Synaesthetic”, which I first heard on a Pure Moods album.)

So I decide to pay Music Choice’s website a visit.

Imagine the fun I had in reading this famous paragraph from Firefox 1.5.0.4 in Linux:

Our service is not currently supported by this browser. For best viewing, use Internet Explorer 6.0 or higher

Okay, so somewhere between ten and fifteen percent of their market doesn’t matter to them. They want me to use a browser that has been declared too dangerous to use, two years ago. We’ve had Firefox for a while now. (I know I’m preaching to the choir here, but wait: it gets better.)

So I have to go back to Windows, and fire up IE. Please have mercy on my poor vulnerable computer, I beg. No such luck

. When I get to their webpage, I get an interface that isn’t very user-friendly. But at least there’s a tab for “Get Music”. All right. I click on it.

There are eight entries. Nothing even close to what I’m interested in. No indication of a scroll bar, search functionality, or anything that suggests I might like to pick the CD I want to buy.

I won’t even try to go into detail about the video interviews that are playing that I didn’t ask to see.

This one rates as one of many “Web Pages That Suck” in my opinion. It was so bad that I just had to look up the URL for Vincent Flanders (and write this blog rant, I suppose).

In short, I took my business to Amazon.com, and bought two CD’s from Amazon that I would have just as easily bought from Music Choice… if I could.

</rant>

(Off topic: Remember Tiananmen Square, 1989. It happened today.)