RGraph and XUL

glazou — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 19:02:00 +0100

Pascal Chevrel posted on twitter a link to RGraph. RGraph is cool and it's very nice and simple to use for HTML documents, but it's almost certainly not usable in XUL because it uses innerHTML and innerHTML sucks on HTML elements when the doctype of the enclosing is not HTML. I'd love to see a XUL version of that. Don't think JavaScript but think dedicated XUL elements and a few XBLs turning the subtree into a graph in a canvas element (or even better SVG). That would just rock and I'm sure a lot of XUL authors would use it almost immediately, including myself. Hey Mozilla Labs, isn't it a neat idea?-)

PS: Olivier Gambier started working on that a while ago, during his tenure at Disruptive Innovations; he did not have enough spare cycles to push it forward and moved to another job.

Cleaner and better CSS

glazou — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 17:55:00 +0100

It's only a beginning, and that's for BlueGriffon. I'll turn it into a Firefox add-on too if I have time.

Lists in the editor

glazou — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 20:26:00 +0100

If you have a few spare cycles and are willing to test a patch fixing an old bug in the editor, please give a try to the patch I contributed today to fix bug 250539. Testing in both Seamonkey and Thunderbird is necessary. Thanks. Feedback welcome through a comment in bug (or private email to me if you can't).

Laurent Jouanneau on deprecating XUL in favor of Jetpack

glazou — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 16:58:00 +0100

Laurent Jouanneau, formerly of Disruptive Innovations and now working for Zoomorama with a bunch of other Mozillians, just posted his take on the XUL vs. Jetpack thingy.

FreeRecord 2.0.1

glazou — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 15:09:00 +0100

Mise à jour fortement recommandée en particulier aux usagers derrière un proxy. A faire via Outils > Modules Complémentaires > clic droit sur FreeRecord > Mise à jour ou par chargement direct depuis http://glazman.org/freerecord.

(Nota bene: remerciements à K.Fauchon pour le rapport de bug)

Jetpack and making the UI world adopt HTML5

glazou — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 10:04:00 +0100

(Disclaimer: I mailed the Jetpack people a rather long document of comments at the end of november. So it's not something popping out suddenly. And it's not an attack, I am commenting here because I have the gut feeling Jetpack - whatever its fate - is something we'll need in the future of UI design and extensibility.)

I have many things to say about Jetpack. I like its power, I dislike its syntax. I _really_ dislike its syntax. I think it totally misses its main goal, making extension authoring dead simple instead of recreating another programming elite. I also think the integration of XHTML elements inside a XUL-based UI raises strong UI homogeneity issues (because they don't flex, align or pack like XUL elements) and could severely harm the UI coolness factor of the whole user interface.

If I look at the three winners of the recent Jetpack contest:

the first winner's code is absolutely not understandable to even an advanced XHTML+CSS developer. Reading Cc["@mozilla.org/appshell/window-mediator;1"].getService(Ci.nsIWindowMediator).getMostRecentWindow("navigator:browser"); in some code that is supposed to be simpler than XUL+chromeJS is puzzling, to say the least...
the second (and main) winner's code raises different issues: images are inline as data URLs because Jetpacks misses offline support and packaging; the HTML element inserted into the statusbar has to be precisely positioned and that will suck depending on the preferred user's font size; the color scheme names cannot be easily localized; I think closures are good and powerful but too many closures make code just unreadable and hardly maintainable; I am not sure I like jetpack.tabs.focused.raw.
The last winner's code is more readable and understandable but when I look at the "JetTabs" button it added to my statusbar on this beautiful Mac OS X screen, I can't help but think we're back fifteen years in time in terms of UI; some methods are poorly named, jetpack.tabs.open should probably be jetpacks.tabs.openNewTab because jetpack.tabs.open could open a URL into the currently selected tab.

If I look at the original Jetpack examples on the Labs' site, I also see plenty of things I dislike, things that must be discussed now or stick for a long long looooooong time.

So where are we now? First, we're far away from a Jetpack 0.1... It's in 0.6.2. So pretty advanced and already mature enough to attract developers even if it's not stable at all and could be drastically modified. What's Jetpack? It's an extensibility mechanism that has in my opinion two goals and two goals only:

Extend the Mozilla add-on ecosystem, currently restricted to a XUL authoring elite, to Web developers,
Pave the way for HTML5/JS/CSS as a universal and ubiquitous set of UI languages.

From my perspective, it's very clear that item 1 is not met at this time. Item 2 will require a different way of doing because if Mozilla moves alone along this path, extensions will remain Mozilla-only and it's then highly plausible Jetpack will remain Mozilla-only. Just like XUL. I don't think this is desirable. The W3C now works on interoperable Widgets and we see vast improvements in global Web interoperability. Why not in UI interoperability?

Whatever the beauty of the current Jetpack and the coolness of 50 lines of code adding a simple Exposé mode to Firefox, I think it's time, based on the initial Jetpack feedback, to think and act differently before reaching a point of no-return. Jetpack should remain a Mozilla Labs' thing, and there should be a joint effort between all browser vendors about browser extensibility. And, in my humble opinion, it should retain better the Keep-It-Simple-and-Stupid motto.

better, simpler, conceptually cleaner, more intuitive API ; no more imports or jetpack.me or wrappedJSObject.
localization, totally forgotten for the time being
availability of required external resources in offline mode AND/OR packaging of extensions
integration with native or native-alike (hear xul) UI and cross-platform issues, a major concern
security model not only of extensions' code but extensions' distribution, undiscussed at this time

Notifications in Firefox

glazou — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 11:07:00 +0100

I think Notifications in Firefox are a problem; a light problem but still. A lot, I mean really a lot, of users don't see them (yes, that's surprising but they just do not notice a notification box appeared) and don't understand them because the prose in the notification box is sometimes too laconic. That triggers emails to extension authors, support, hotline that could be avoided and in some cases the users just flee away, thinking something does not work or is wrong with the web site.

A simple way to do that would be a dual system, popups and notifications. By default at first launch, Firefox uses popups for notifications and these popups contain a checkbox "Check this box if you prefer notification boxes in the browser's window instead of popups". So the user can move to notification boxes if that's his/her desire.

Just my two eurocents.

FreeRecord multi-boîtiers

glazou — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 17:03:00 +0100

J'ai un build multi-boîtiers HD de FreeRecord mais je suis incapable de le tester puisque je n'ai moi-même qu'un seul boîtier... Merci de me filer un coup de main en testant la bête :

téléchargez sur votre disque la cible de ce lien
dans Firefox, faites Fichier > Ouvrir fichier et ouvrez le fichier que vous venez de sauver
installez la version 1.6 de FreeRecord
relancez Firefox et testez sur vos deux boîtiers (si vous n'avez qu'un seul boîtier, le choix ne vous est pas offert donc inutile de tester...)
ajoutez un commentaire à cet article pour me dire si ça marche

Si ça marche, je le passe en prod dès ce soir. Merci !

Microsoft, Word, i4i, XML #2

glazou — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 10:07:00 +0100

This is what I wrote last 12th of august:

Microsoft ordered to stop selling Word... And basically most Office products and Visio and and and.

First personal reaction is shock ; second reaction is "oh wait, I4I ????" ; third reaction is "oooooh shit".

Just for the record, and that's something the CNet article does not mention, I4I acquired Grif's assets when it collapsed... Oh, and my old boss Jean Paoli (XML 1.0 co-editor) moved from Grif to Microsoft a while before that.

I4I filed the patent in july 1994, i.e. at a time the idea of a unified DOM and DOM api started percolating slowly into the SGML community. As a matter of fact, the patent is not about the Web but really about SGML. Please note USPTO took four years to validate the patent !!! Four years, that's more than a generation in our web wold. In 1994, the Web was still almost confidential. In 1998, the Web had already changed the world.

I am unfortunately not sure this patent fight is a patent troll. Patents on software are incredibly harmful, they are a too weak shield for innovators that use them and a burden on innovators that don't carry the patent. Let's compare codes, not ideas.

I was right. Microsoft just lost and has to pay $290 million. For those of you who don't really understand what's going on here and how it could affect the XML world, let me explain a bit...

The original authors of XML had two kinds of document instances in mind : the first ones, well-known, conform to a document model. Call it a dtd or a schema or whatever, documents conform to some sort of structural description and only what's allowed by the structure is found in the documents ; validators are the tools that can confirm a given document conforms to a given structure. On another hand, well-formed documents are documents that are XML, with tags and everything, but don't have a structure. You design them as you need them, you're the sole user of the format so you don't really need a specified structure and validation.

"Custom XML" lives between these two species. If you're working with documents conforming to a given document model, how do you insert "custom" tags (no, don't think namespaces, think 1994...) in these documents, retaining validity and still enabling load/edit/save and everything? That's the purpose of i4i's patent.

Does it affect our daily work on XML or does it affect our future work? I don't think so. First, inserting arbitrary XML tags without associated dtd/schema and namespace in a given instance is nowadays probably a very marginal use case. Second, you could always declare an arbitrary namespace for your user-defined tags and let the user-agent treat the document in a single document tree (in other terms, you don't need to separate structure and content and recreate an internal structure for your arbitrary tags, and that is the heart of i4i's patent). Third, i4i's patent was filed at a time the DOM and namespaces did not exist and we now handle compound XML instances in a different way. Fourth, schemas can control where extra XML elements are allowed (the case of DTDs is a bit more complex ).

Let's summarize: Microsoft fell in a nice trap, probably because their Legal Department did not do its job well enough. $290m, that's severe, and a few layers deserve a kick in the butt. I also think the whole debate (and to be more precise the case) is totally rotten. Microsoft was judged on the presence of a "custom XML editor" add-on in Word; but I see no clear facts in the ruling about a technical infringement on i4i's patent. In other words, yes Microsoft implemented and shipped a "custom XML editor" and a "custom XML editor" is described in i4i's patent; but no it's not clear at all they implemented it using the methods described in i4i's patent...

Again, I do believe software patents are a serious threat for Software in general. In this case, codes and algorithms were not even compared and I find it not only ridiculous but also dangerous.

Grille des programmes dans FreeRecord #2

glazou — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 17:55:00 +0100

C'est fait et disponible soit par votre Gestionnaire de Modules Complémentaires dans Firefox soit depuis le site.

Grille des programmes dans FreeRecord

glazou — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 17:45:00 +0100

Bon, ça commence à prendre forme.

FreeRecord pour Firefox

glazou — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 13:33:00 +0100

FreeRecord 1.0 est une extension (add-on) pour Firefox >=3.5. Elle fonctionne sur toute plate-forme, Window, Mac OS X et Linux. Elle vous permet, sur la donnée de votre indentifiant et mot de passe de connexion à votre interface de gestion Free, de programmer à distance des enregistrements sur votre FreeboxHD. La totalité des chaînes auxquelles vous êtes abonné sont visibles. Cette extension est disponible sous licence Mozilla Public License et est gratuite.

/* Enjoy ! */

Browser War 2009, ma présentation W3C/INRIA du 25/11/2009

glazou — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 16:14:00 +0100

Tout est dit dans le titre je pense, c'est en français et c'est là.

Serializers

glazou — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 13:37:00 +0100

I am hitting an issue with the content serializers (yeah, yeah, the "burden"). The OutputFormatted flag (from nsIDocumentEncoder) implies wrapping and that's wrong behaviour. Wrapping should only be triggered by the OutputWrap flag IMHO... I'll try to improve that.

Selectors Level 3

glazou — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 18:46:00 +0100

I have the intense pleasure to let you know that the specification Selectors Level 3 just became officially a Proposed Recommendation !!! YAY !!!

Goodbye Irène

glazou — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 10:02:00 +0100

Irène Vatton (fr-FR), research engineer at INRIA and former W3C Staff, recently retired. If you're implementing rendering engines for Web Standards and you don't know her name, let me tell you one thing: you should make her a place of choice in your personal pantheon. Irène was already working on rendering engines for markup languages at a time you were probably in diapers. She implemented stylesheets to add presentation to markup long before the idea of CSS even emerged. Grif (fr-FR), the SGML editor/browser she implemented with Vincent Quint, was the first modern wysiwyg editor for markup languages based on a validator. It's quoted in Tim Berners-Lee's book "Weaving the Web" and it's only because the CEO of the company that industrialized and sold Grif did not see the value of the Web (can you believe it...) Grif did not become THE browser company 3 years before the very first lines of NCSA Mosaic. Grif eventually became Amaya, the W3C editor/browser.

Irène, with Vincent and their team, paved the way for the Web as we know it. They wrote research papers and lines of code that became invaluable for the Web as we know it. In 1993, they already had everything: markup, very powerful stylesheets (please trust me on that...), transformations, multiview, vectorial graphics, tables, schemas, and more. What we did during the 15 last years was just a reinvention of the wheel they invented before the Web.

I had the great pleasure to work with Irène when I was at Grif. Irène was inspirational and always here to help a n00b like the young graduate I was at that time. She taught me a lot, and I would not be where I am today without Grif.

Thank you so much Irène. I hope we'll still see you around from time to time.

Waooooooow, Ample SDK

glazou — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 09:24:00 +0100

Ample SDK, a must-see:

cross-browser (Gecko, Webkit, Opera, Chrome, and even IE 5.5+ !!)
XInclude 1.0, XML Events 1.0, XML Schema, SMIL 3.0, REX 1.0, XBL 2.0 (!), SVG, XUL (cross-browser !), HTML5, XForms, ...
superb demos (SVG-based @shepazu in IE, wow...)
dual MIT/GPL licensing terms
open-source

Very, very impressive. Sincere congrats to Sergey Ilinsky and his team.

Grrrr

glazou — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 18:37:00 +0100

Step 1:

Dear add-on author,

You're receiving this message because one or more of your add-ons has been
removed from the trusted add-on list. This is part of an ongoing effort to
tighten security on AMO and improve add-on quality. Close to 100 add-ons
have been removed from the list, and obtaining trusted status will be much
harder in the future.
...
Jorge Villalobos
Add-ons Developer Relations Lead, Mozilla

Step 2:

Hello,

There's a question I've been asked so much, that I think it deserves some
clarification for everyone: "Why was my add-on removed from trusted status?".
I realize now that I was to vague in my initial message. I apologize for that.

The answer is pretty much the same for everyone.

Trusted status was previously handed out on a basis of merit. If you deserved
trusted status (for being an outstanding member of the community, for having
a good relationship with Mozilla, for creating a really good add-on, etc),
you got it. This lead to the trusted list to become very large and hard to
manage.

Now the trusted status will only be given on a basis of need. None of the
reasons mentioned above are sufficient to get trusted status. You will only
be considered if you can prove a *need* for instant updates. I removed all
add-ons that didn't appear to have that need.
...
Jorge Villalobos
Add-ons Developer Relations Lead, Mozilla

Ah. My reaction stands in one word only : Grrrrrrrr... I don't mind having my new extensions not trusted since they are new, but un-trusting an already existing and trusted extension is just a pain - for authors and also users even if not millions of users - and, to tell the truth, quite unfair.

Opera widgets without Opera... #3

glazou — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 14:46:00 +0100

YAY !!! Still a lot to do but it starts looking ok !

Opera widgets without Opera... #2

glazou — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 11:10:00 +0100

I have created a window gadget to manage widgets.