Major changes ahead, stay tuned.

Je cite France 2 : "Il y a désormais 3 enfants en France prénommés Ikéa. Dans les trois cas, ce sont des enfants que les parents ont eu une grande difficulté à avoir, et le nom a été choisi en se rappelant la grande difficulté qu'ont eu les parents à monter les meubles Ikéa"

Effrayant...

Cet évènement gagne aisément le grand prix du sordide pour la journée...

Everything's in the screenshot :-) Yeah, I know, not very accessible but it's 6am and I am lazy.

• tab-editing almost done; minor tweaking remains. I have to say I am very impressed by both (again) Mozilla as a platform and by Composer by its incredible extensibility. A big applause for my former colleagues of the Editor team (Kathy, Charley, Kin, Akkana, Joe) for the job on the editorshell's removal and the editing session. That's just awesome.
• implemented XFN. I have modified the dialog shown below in this blog to be more Mozilla-compliant.
• started thinking about table column/row resizing using the mouse
• cleaned up the Format toolbar and finally got rid of the ugly A-, A+, B, I and U icons.
• confirmed bug 227267 with Nvu and applied successfully darin's patch

People, the two last weeks brought a major event that almost nobody noticed, and I think it's worth discussing it a little bit. A standard-to-be died yesterday.

A few days ago, Ian Hickson proposed a great extension to HTML 4 forms as an extension to XHTML 1.0. It is a remarkable proposal, very well balanced, simple to understand and to use. In other words, it is a real XForms-killer. And to be honest, XForms delenda est. Then Tantek Çelik and his friends proposed XFN, an extension to HTML link for XHTML allowing to specify friendship relations into a link. It is a remarkably simple proposal, simple to understand and to use. In other words, it is a real FOAF-killer. And to be honest, FOAF delenda est.

So what's the standard-to-be I am talking about ? That standard-to-be is XHTML 2. Yes, again. No, that's not a leitmotiv, the above just proves I was right, the Blogosphere will kill it, eventually. People are going faster, and smarter, than huge Working Groups where bitter-sweet compromise is the rule and not the exception. What people like Ian and Tantek are coming up with is a new extended version of XHTML 1.0, in other words a new extended XMLized version of HTML 4.01, and that concept looks close to my xHTML 5 isn't it ? That allows simple, easy, and fast adoption by web authors. That also allows simple, easy and fast implementation by engineering, and I think I just proved that assertion yesterday.

Things like XUL, XBL, XAML, HTC (or whatever it is called now at Microsoft) allow the extension of the browsing and editing environments in a non-intrusive manner. They allow to build downloadable add-ons. They fully comply with the concept of module as we see it used by Ian. We have seen in the recent past XForms implemented using such extensions. But that's really a hammer to kill a fly, and nobody sees web pages with XForms inside hitting your desktop computer on a daily basis any time soon.

Read me well, I bet a cookie on it : the future of the Web will not be XHTML 2, it will be an extension of XHTML 1.0 and new browsers will likely accept the extensions into HTML 4.01 documents because that's what web authors will need and will want.

In my opinion, XFN needs a default informative stylesheet. Something not too flashy, not too textual. Perhaps iconic but not intrusive. Icons very easy to read and understand. Who has a few spare cycles to invest on that?

Some write it, some implement it;-)

After swedish LindowsOS resellers, french resellers are the new target.

• tab-editing is now an XBL binding
• "New" button offers now to create a tab or a page, same thing in File menu
• tabs show a throbber during document download
• tabs show a special icon when the document is modified
• Closing the window will offer to save/publish all modified documents
• Tabs show the title of the document if it exists
• Filepicker now uses the document's title to propose a file name
• fixed the classic theme's bug in Composer that prevents the B/I/U/... button to show the current selection state in a very readable manner

After a lot of problems, tab-editing is now almost fully functional. I need to do some strong code cleanup and add features but the basis works entirely without problem.