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" Il est meilleur d'être irresponsable et dans le vrai que responsable et dans l'erreur " -- Winston Churchill

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June 2004

Wednesday 30 June 2004

Future of the Web #2

Yep people, this is really about the future of the Web. After the WHAT WG, this is another question mark about the relevance of the World Wide Web Consortium as an organization still able to lead the Web to its full potential. And unfortunately for the W3C, I have no doubt this new alliance will be more efficient than a W3C Working Group on the same topic.

Un été 2004

Summer vacations are here, the Glazblog will (try to) remain silent a little while.

Netscape 7.2

Seems Pascal Chevrel has found a pre-7.2 somewhere...

Office 2004/Mac

Interesting confirmation from Tantek Çelik that Tasman, MacIE's layout engine, is included in Office 2004 for Mac... Hum....

Tuesday 29 June 2004

iPaq hell

I was working on minimo's stylesheet this afternoon, playing with my iPaq under familiar when it suddenly went off. Impossible to restart the iPaq, even the hard reset does not work. Eventually, I took the battery from the other one and tried again. Yep, the first Ipaq's battery suddenly died. Ready for the trash. Grumble.

Nvu progress 20040629

  • all changes applied using the rulers are now undoable
  • now working on the vertical ruler. Update: it works, see below

    first vRuler demo

XQuery

A very interesting read about XQuery. Warning, the article was recently slashdotted so don't worry if it answers slowly...

Atazone.fr

Pourquoi je n'ai pas fait de vieux os chez Amazon.fr... L'ambiance n'a pas changé, à ce que je vois. Je souhaite bien du plaisir à ceux qui migreront à Slough; l'endroit est minable, les conditions de travail y sont bien pires que celles de Guyancourt. J'ai toujours dit qu'Amazon est un service magnifique du point de vue du client mais qu'il ne fallait pas voir comment on y bosse en interne.

Monday 28 June 2004

Nvu progress 20040628

Again, a lot of progress on the rulers and table column resizing. The code is much cleaner and the result is now almost perfect. I can resize any element using the horizontal ruler and I can even change the margins that way (thanks Neil for the suggestion).

horiz ruler demo

Historic and happy

Oval office fun

- Dick, the situation is going really bad in Iraq, they have caught a Marine now, and we'll soon need two more bodybags...
- yes, f--- yourself, George, f--- off
- why do you curse like that?
- I don't really know, it's a new twitch, I need to curse at least once a day; hey, it even happened to me in the Senate :-)
- my mom told me to wash my mouth with soap when it happens, go to the bathroom Dick...
- but George...
- George is the President of the United States...
- grmmmblllll
- so what are we going to do in Iraq? Americans start thinking this is out of control, that we fail keeping that country at peace
- I have an idea
- like your usual ideas or worse, Dick ?
- let's give back their sovereignty to the Iraqis right now and our problem becomes their problem..
- Remarkable idea, let's do that. But is it going to change the situation there, I mean what about the oil?
- bah, Iraq is still ours
- Dick, I love you, if you promise to curse less, I take you to San Francisco to marry you
- uuuh, George
- hey Dick, now you can curse!

The true face of happyness, isn't it....

this guy smiles only when he is fined by the highway police

Saturday 26 June 2004

Sortie de contexte

Amusons-nous un instant, je vais sortir un morceau de l'interview de Tristan par LinuxFrench de son contexte :

quelle est la question à laquelle vous auriez aimé répondre et que nous ne vous avons pas posée ?
J’en ai deux, ça ira ? ;-)

Rhôôôôôôô Tristan, tout le monde croyait pourtant que tu étais monorchide :-D

WHAT the hell

Between 2004-06-24 11:06am and now, 190 messages on the public WHAT mailing-list... This is out of control.

Friday 25 June 2004

Ten years

Ten years ago...

  • ten years ago, I was ending six months of disease, thanks to a bad shrimp at a SGML User's Group meeting. It ended in surgery.
  • precisely ten years ago to the minute, Maria and I were at the City Hall to say "yes"; it was raining, her wedding dress was marvelous, and the whole day is unforgettable.

IMPORTANT : identity theft

My identity was recently used, and abused, by someone who left in my name a hate message (and an ugly one) on Gervase Markham's blog. Gerv had the courage to mail me about it yesterday night. I would have probably never noticed the problem without his email...

A few details about the blog comment itself : it contains a word I had never seen/used in my whole life in english. The author is apparently someone quite impulsive and stupid, and forgot I'm just a frog... I'm sure Gerv's blog system keeps track of IP addresses and a few other data that will easily show I am not the author of that comment. I just never have this kind of thoughts. As I told Gerv, I am fighting the religions and the clerics, not the people.

A few things about the real author of that comment : that's someone who reads my blog, reads Gerv's. In other words, that's a mozillian, or at least someone interested enough in our technologies to read two Mozilla-related blogs. I know only two persons able to do that because they hate me, and I am really not sure about the first one. That leaves one name, or the possibility of a new asshole who's never really been in touch with me and wants to soil my reputation just for fun, or because he/she hates me after my posts about religion in general and Catholicism in particular. To that person, I have nothing to say, he/she would need a neurone to understand my words and his/her brain cavity is visibly empty.

To the people who read that hate message and became mad about me, I'm just saying it was not me, so please forget about your madness.

To Gerv, I say that unfortunately, this is the kind of shitproblems you get these days on the Internet. The time we were just a bunch of trusted people is so far away in time that a vast majority of Internauts had never heard of the Internet or the Web at that time. Even if I am not responsible at all for what happened, let me tell you Gerv how sorry I am for that; and how mad I am at the person who did it. We'll sort it out. In the meantime, can I ask you to put offline that disgusting comment, and the related responses : I don't want to see my name attached to such a hate message. Thanks a lot.

To blog owners and blog system developers, I say we need to "secure" a bit open comments like Gerv's or mine. I think a textfield allowing to enter a passphrase, communicated to blog's owner when he/she receives a comment but never displayed on the blog itself, would probably be a good and cheap system. It could make sure the poster is really who he/she pretends to be. Anyway, spam comments were already a big problem, but THAT is scary. I just don't want my identity to be abused again that way. Ah, a last thing : if in the future you see a comment apparently from me on your blog and that comment seems strange, don't explode immediately; double-check with me first, thanks a lot.

I am really shocked by what happened. If I ever find who's behind, his/her name will be made public. Because it deserves to be.

Thursday 24 June 2004

</ms:tantek>

Apparently, Tantek Çelik, former Tasman's technical lead, has left Microsoft and joins Technorati.... Wow... Good luck my friend, hope you'll have a lot of fun in this new adventure!

Nvu 0.30 for Mac OS X

IMPORTANT WARNING : These Mac OS X builds are external contributions, and Disruptive Innovations, Lindows Inc. or my own person were not involved in the build process and can't be responsible for any damage caused to your computer and/or data resulting from the use of those software packages. Now, enjoy :-)

Nvu progress 20040624

  • added a selection listener to update my rulers
  • the editor now fires a specific event when it does EndUpdateViewBatch() with mUpdateCount > 0; that event is caught by my ruler as a signal to update itself. This was absolutely needed for elements changing of size depending on their contents, like a table cell with no specified width for instance.
  • column selection when clicking in the ruler had a bug, it works fine now
  • thanks Neil Rashbrook for giving me the idea of setting the margins using the ruler; I already started working on it.

Even pornstars care about HTML and CSS

The Nvu mailing-list just received an incredible spam. It was not caught by Thunderbird junk filter and was my first unread email in Inbox so Thunderbird displayed it automatically. Warning, this is sexually oriented BUT there is something special and funny in this message for those interested in style and layout. You've been warned. Here is the screenshot. Now look at the right side of the bimbo's face :-) I swear it was in the message and I left it untouched. Please note the text is in the image since it could not flow "around" the face like it does.

Wednesday 23 June 2004

Unordered 20040623

  • Disruptive Innovations signed a business deal with another contracting company this week. And there's perhaps a new development contract for Disruptive Innovations in the pipe too... I may have to hire again soon.
  • Donc l'éthylotest à un euro est en vente en pharmacie. C'est vrai qu'on va souvent boire un verre en pharmacie le samedi soir sur le coup de 22 heures. Quelle bande d'imbéciles... Alors qu'il fallait les mettre dans les bars et boîtes de nuit...
  • La pastille verte des voitures, le principal bilan de Dominique Voynet au Ministère de l'Environnement, est officiellement obsolète depuis le 1er janvier. Vous pouvez enfin décoller cette cochonnerie de votre pare-brise. De toute manière, elle n'avait pas de date d'expiration, ce qui est coton pour une preuve de "propreté" d'une voiture !!! Encore bravo Dominique ! Juste une question : ça a coûté combien votre grosse bêtise, là ? Moins que le Carnet de Santé de Juppé j'espère :-)
  • /me gratulerar Sverige för EM... Ni spelar mycket bättre än Frankrike ;-)
  • Je sais ce qui me déplait le plus chez Baroin. Il a fallu France Info ce matin pour me le faire comprendre : c'est sa voix. Sa voix est dédaigneuse à souhait. Elle suinte la suffisance. A l'image, j'ai du mal à encadrer le protégé de Chirac. Mais à l'audio seul, il m'est totalement insupportable, nettement plus que le maire de Bordeaux.
  • I could spend all night reading this. Don't miss the chapter about Tintin's syldavian language. Note for Karl : what's the language code ?-)

Canard du matin, rires en coin

Pleurs de rires ce matin en face de mon café à la lecture d'un des cartouches du Canard Enchaîné du jour :

" Pour ses Mémoires Clinton a déjà touché 10 millions de dollars :
Nom d'une pipe !... Quel à-valoir ! "

BWAHAHAHAHAHA :-) Le Canard Enchaîné, quelques kilogrammes d'intelligence et d'humour dans un monde de brutes.

Tuesday 22 June 2004

Note to self

If another proof was needed, I now have it :-) Bwahahahaha, just like always, they'll never change.

Nvu progress 20040622

A lot of progress on table column resizing today... I know the image below is only a static screenshot, but locate the pointer in the ruler; I was really resizing two columns. It works very well. Of course, it also allows to select a column. It will probably be tougher for rows since we don't have vertical text. Hum. We'll see.

resizing table columns with the mouse in Nvu

Monday 21 June 2004

Yes, you can be stupid at age 83 too

And here's the proof. I'm not so suprised it's Ray Bradbury.

Nvu progress 20040621

  • goodbye valign="top" on table cells :-)
  • context-click on a toolbar now allows to customize the toolbar, like in FF and TB

Sunday 20 June 2004

Nvu localization

As I wrote a few days ago, we have received a lot of help proposals for the localization of Nvu. It's hard to process a so large number of emails because we have to read all messages to know the languages you are able to help about and so on. So, if you are willing to help on Nvu's localization, please resend a mail to daniel AT glazman DOT org with a subject line beginning with

[NVU-L10N]

and make it follow by a whitespace and the code of the language (ISO 639-1 preferred), and by an optional whitespace and keyword "main" if you already have a community set up for that purpose. If by chance, you already have a L10N package ready for Nvu 0.30, include the extra keyword "ready". For instance:

[NVU-L10N] fr
if you want to help french localization
[NVU-L10N] sv-FI main
if you want to help swedish (Finlandssvenska) localization and already have a community for that
[NVU-L10N] ja ready
if you have a japanese localization of Nvu 0.30 ready for release but don't have a community organized for that

Do not add anything else to the subject line, please. If you add the keyword "ready" to your subject line, please include all information regarding your existing community to your email. If you don't tag your email as described above, it won't be detected by my filters and will be thrown away. We are going to list all the proposals on a new page on nvudev.org, sorted by language. So, if you do send me an email, it means you explicitely agree to have your name and email address included on that page.

Once we have those lists and mailing-lists/web pages pointers, it'll be much easier for you to start working together. You'll be responsible for everything beyond that point. We won't provide forums or mailing lists on a per language basis, that's just impossible given the number of proposals.

The result of your work, based on Nvu versions not older than 0.30, will be made available from nvudev.org. We won't list L10N packages for 0.20 or earlier. It can be a link only if you have your own web hosting; we'll just ask you to let us know how many downloads you have, for instance on a monthly basis.

Thanks a lot!!!

Desktop Linux for everyone

I expressed precisely the same opinion during the Desktop Linux Summit.

Bad damowmow

Ce chat est un branquignol. Je veux dire que pour un chat adulte, il est aussi mauvais chat qu'un décideur AOL est un mauvais décideur. C'est tout dire, hein ? Je m'explique. Le petit merle, né il y a quelques semaines et qui avait quitté le nid il y a quelques jours, picorait joyeusement la terre près du muret. Oui, là où la terre était restée humide du déluge d'hier matin, là où les vers étaient faciles à déterrer. Mais le chat de R., un très beau chat au demeurant, avait aussi repéré ce terrain de chasse des petits merles. Et couïc, les cris d'alarme du petit merle tentant d'échapper au chat ont déclenché une émeute chez les autres merles de la résidence, qui se sont mis à attaquer en piqué le prédateur. Le bruit de la douzaine de merles, qui d'habitude chantent et là ne faisait que des séries de clics, était impressionnant. Bon, je suis repassé assez vite au DVD du Retour du Roi parce que bon, hein, le rôle des chats, c'est bien de boulotter les petits merles dont le rôle est de se faire boulotter par les chats, non ? Mais au bout de vingt minutes, ce con de chat n'avait toujours pas réussi à occir le merle ! La bestiole avait perdu la moitié de ses plumes dans les griffes et dents du chat; ses deux ailes étaient cassées et son oeil droit était en très mauvais état. Le chat donnait un coup de griffe sanglant par minute mais dès que le merle criait, il reculait de peur. Quel con ce chat.

Là, j'en ai eu marre. Je ne peux rien faire pour un chat con au point d'être incapable de bouffer un merle avant de l'avoir achevé ET incapable de l'achever. Mais je pouvais éviter à ce petit merle, en tellement mauvais état qu'il était de toute manière foutu, de finir doucement en lambeaux, au bout de plusieurs heures de hurlements. Parce que ce chat ne dépend pas du merle pour sa pitance quotidienne tout de même, il a son sheba de luxe à la blanquette de veau qui l'attend au coin de la cuisine. Donc acte. Les autres merles ont rapidement cessé de couiner et sont même partis du lieu du crime. Le chat s'est mis à table.

Vraiment trop con ce chat.

Saint-Germain en Laye, ou la liberté de dépenser mais pas de penser

Parfois j'ai honte de mon pays. Comme ce matin j'ai honte de ma ville par exemple... Je faisais tranquillement mon marché, quand deux gars sympas m'abordent avec un tract simple. Oh, visiblement des activistes très dangereux : la section locale de la Ligue des Droits de l'Homme (LDH). Une organisation connue pour être anti-démocratique n'est-ce pas ? Les deux gars en question me parlent d'un truc que j'ignorais totalement, ma ville Saint-Germain en Laye va installer 10 caméras de vidéosurveillance permanente, filmant 24h/24, pivotant sur 360 degrés, zoomant sur 400 mètres. C'est vrai que Saint-Germain, c'est la Zone dangereuse, où madame se fait agresser tous les quinze mètres par des vitrines pleines de Rolex. Bon. On peut discuter du bien-fondé de la chose mais là n'est pas le problème.

Alors que les deux gars continuaient très poliment leur laïus, arrivent des agents de la police municipale qui demandent, certes poliment, si les gars ont une autorisation pour distribuer des tracts, et non ah bon bien nous verbalisons (après avoir vérifié par radio - auprès de qui ? le commissariat municipal ou plus haut ?- qu'il fallait bien le faire). Vingt mètres plus loin, des gars inondent le pavé avec des tracts d'une expo photo sur le rugby soutenue par la Mairie. Eux bien entendu ne seront pas verbalisés, puisque c'est un truc "officiel".

Saint-Germain en laye, sous la férule d'Emmanuel Lamy, c'est de plus en plus "panem et circenses" et cela commence à me gonfler sérieusement. Quand on lui signale que le carrefour de la gare routière, devant la Mairie, est un danger mortel permanent pour les piétons, il répond (je cite) "et que voulez-vous que j'y fasse, vous n'avez qu'à écrire au préfet mon vieux". Mais quand la LDH ose interpeler le citoyen sur un sujet d'importance, hop, on verbalise aussitôt. Saint-Germain, où rien ne doit troubler le bonheur de l'électeur UMP. Saint-Germain, c'est "parlez librement mais ailleurs".

Bref : jeudi 24 juin à 20h30 à la Maison des Associations de StGermain en Laye, 3 rue de la république; si vous êtes d'ici, venez, venez apprendre le Saint-Germain qu'Emmanuel Lamy nous mijote, à quel coût financier, à quel coût légal. Venez.

Saturday 19 June 2004

Comme vache qui quoi déjà ?

Si l'adage "mariage pluvieux, mariage heureux" est vrai, et vu le déluge de ce matin, Laurent Jouanneau doit être en train de se préparer à quelques siècles de bonheur bien intense :-) Tous mes voeux!!!!!

Friday 18 June 2004

Florilège

Il faut le lire pour le croire. Monsieur Christophe Aulnette, P-DG de Microsoft France et VP Microsoft EMEA, parle beaucoup à la Presse. Participe à beaucoup de conférences. Il cause Monsieur Aulnette. Et puis il a du culot Monsieur Aulnette, gros kommak. Cela ne l'empêche pas de raconter pleins de conneries, Monsieur Aulnette, conneries dont voici quelques extraits bien choisis. Attention les yeux:

  1. "La sécurité est un thème que nous considérons comme prioritaire"
  2. "On a assoupli notre politique commerciale. Microsoft a changé: sécurité, fiabilité, compatibilité sont devenues nos priorités!"
  3. "Les choses sont différentes dès lors que l'on prend en compte les coûts de maintenance et d'intervention, par exemple, qui sont très largement supérieurs dans le cas des logiciels libres"
  4. "Le modèle de l'Open Source mise sur les services, alors que, pour notre part, nous misons plutôt sur la propriété intellectuelle. Il faut prendre garde à une approche qui se fonde essentiellement sur les services : aujourd'hui, ces derniers peuvent être très facilement délocalisés en Inde ou en Chine.."
  5. "Le modèle "je donne le logiciel, je vends le service" est pour moi un mirage, car il ne permet pas de financer l'innovation sur le long terme. D'ailleurs, quelles ont été les innovations réalisées dans le logiciel libre depuis dix ans ? Je n'en vois pas."

Je vous avais prévenu... Mes réponses:

  1. Oui, prioritaire. Un peu comme un fumeur qui pense à s'arrêter de fumer : entre deux cigarettes, il s'arrête à chaque fois.
  2. Sécurité : 150 trous de sécurité majeurs en trois ans. Fiabilité : tout usager industriel de Windows a eu au moins une fois à ré-installer le système en deux ans suite à un plantage total; la plupart des usagers d'Unix n'ont _jamais_ connu ça. Compatibilité : même quand Microsoft implémente les standards dont elle a participé à la normalisation, XSLT par exemple, l'implémentation n'est pas compatible avec le standard.
  3. J'ai toujours un exemple en tête, celui du calcul massivement parallèle. Les solutions propriétaires sont hors de prix, tant du côté logiciel que matériel. Cela a poussé nombre de centres de recherche à bâtir des clusters de machines linux collaboratives, souvent sur des machines du "marché tarif". Des machines tellement peu onéreuses qu'il vaut mieux les jeter quand elles sont en panne que payer le support annuellement ! L'économie se mesure alors en facteur MILLE, voire plus ! J'ai aussi en tête l'exemple d'un annuaire de _grosse_ entreprise, bâti sur techno Microsoft; cela coûtait une telle fortune que la seule MAINTENANCE d'une année a payé la totalité de la migration sur Linux et sa maintenance pendant cinq ans.
  4. ...alors que Microsoft, Sun, HP qui sont donc des industriels du Software ne font pas développer à Bengalore et à Pékin. Vous prenez vraiment vos interlocuteurs pour des cons, Monsieur Aulnette ?
  5. Hmmm. Soyons honnêtes, c'est une belle question. Une innovation, pour moi, c'est quelque chose de vraiment nouveau, que personne n'avait jamais fait avant. Et la barre de 1994 pose problème. Mais je ne vois pas beaucoup non plus d'innovation franche dans le monde commercial du logiciel entre mi-94 et aujourd'hui. Des amélioration énormes, certes. Des vraies innovations franches, peu. Au fait, rappelons-nous comment Microsoft a "évalué" l'innovation Internet/Web.

Alors Monsieur Aulnette, quand on veut vraiment faire prendre des vessies pour des lanternes, on évite de confondre gourde et vessie. Vous savez, même dans les Ministères et chez les Grands Comptes, il y a maintenant des gens capables de comprendre, et vérifier ce que vous racontez. En l'occurence, vous racontez beaucoup, beaucoup trop de bêtises.

Yep!

Ah, finally, someone else liked The Station Agent.

La Canaille

bz and Emma peterv tristan

Nvu and Composer progress 20040618

  • In some cases, margins/paddings are incorrectly computed when you want to resize a table or a absolutely positioned object and the resizing handles don't appear at the right position. I have a first fix for this, working perfectly in my tree. I need to optimize it.
  • Update: Nvu 0.30 for Fedora 2 tarball. Uncompress and untar the tarball and run nvu from the created directory.

Wednesday 16 June 2004

Thunderbird 0.7 bug

I have switched to Thunderbird 0.7 because of the multiple identity per account support. It's a great feature, I really needed it. But the feature is a big buggy. If you want to use it, you have to read the following:

  1. a new identity associated to an account will NOT use the corresponding SMTP server but the default SMTP server... That will allow you to add identities to one account and one only; if you try to do it for a second account, you have a problem with the mail server...
  2. it's probably a side-effect of the same bug : all mails sent using such an identity are saved in Local Folders, not in your account's folder.

Everything is probably caused by the way those identities are created, they are probably pseudo-accounts, and the default values for thos pseudo-accounts use the default SMTP server and the Local Folders. At least, it's a plausible explanation. But the bug is very annoying.

Nevermind... Just make sure you're running 0.7 and not a release candidate :-/ Sorry for that, Scott.

Remove automatic XPI update ?

Well. This is a totally mad world.

Libertaires et cons à la fois

On s'en doutait déjà, mais maintenant la preuve est faite. Ouvrez cette page, puis cliquez sur "3 commentaires à propos de cet article" et lisez les commentaires en question. Je rappelle qu'Action Directe n'a pas envoyé que de la dentelle sur la tête de Besse et d'Audran. Consternant.

Nvu progress 20040616

  • if in Nvu 0.30 you click on a table's border, between two cells, it fires an an alert with four numbers. I was trying to detect the click on a border to resize the table using the mouse. This is fixed.
  • worked on table UI, the first ruler now displays correctly the cells' width:

    ruler shows cells' width

    Hmmmm, I'm going to love this feature.

Thank you Andrew

People, I got the formal agreement from Andrew Fedoniouk, Blocknote for Net's author, to reuse the UI metaphor he implemented for table column/row resizing. I already started working on it, it's going to be a marvelous feature for Nvu. Thank you so much Andrew.

Update: here is a screenshot. The horizontal and vertical rulers show the positions and sizes of the rows and columns of the table. Everything can be manipulated with the mouse. It's really neat, and it's MUCH simpler to implement in Gecko's model than the common click-on-borders model.

Tuesday 15 June 2004

Are you ready ?

No, I still have no cell phone. And I live very well without cell phone.

Nvu progress 20040615

  • a lot, really a lot of downloads. Has slowed down the server! At least 3 mirrors set up, and availability through the torrent :-)
  • added a "Select local directory" button to the Publishing Site Settings dialog (see 0.30 Known Issues)
  • fixed build on windows/mingw (thanks smontagu)
  • already existing document's language and/or document's writing direction were overriden by user's prefs (reported by smontagu again); this is now fixed
  • typo in "Left to Right" menu item fixed...
  • document Why Nvu? updated

Mirror for Nvu 0.30

You can also get Nvu 0.30 binaries from here

Monday 14 June 2004

Nvu 0.30 is now available for Windows and Linux

The title says it all. Enjoy!

Update: grrrr, I forgot again about MS VC7 missing DLLs... Blame Microsoft! I am uploading right now a new installer with those DLLs so if you see this update, you don't have to care about them, they're in the box.

Being ridiculous does not kill

Unfortunately...(source: Pascal Chevrel)

Nvu 0.30, build it yourself

Updated build instructions are now available here.

Sunday 13 June 2004

Karl makes me laugh

Yes, Karl makes me laugh... Excerpt from his blog, linking mine:

Pourquoi étendre une spécification HTML 4.01, qui a une sémantique mal définie, qui contient d'énormes ambiguités, qui se contradit de temps en temps, etc. Etendre HTML 4.01 sans le corriger, cela ne servirait à rien. La corriger est un travail énorme, et je ne suis pas certains que tout le monde en a conscience.

In substance, Karl says HTML 4 is a sub-optimal spec badly written that needs too much work to be extended. In other words, its success is a miracle and "HTML 4 delenda est". Well, I wish all bad specs of the world a success like HTML 4's :-)

Une faille s'est ouverte

Une faille s'est ouverte. Spatio-temporelle, bien entendu. Samedi soir, sur le coup de 20h30, je me suis retrouvé précisément 21 ans en arrière, pendant ce mois de Juin 1983 dédié au Bac C. Vingt et un an, nom de Zeus.... Est-ce qu'on aurait quelque chose à se dire ? Allait-on passer la soirée à se regarder bêtement en chiens de faïence ? Et ben non, pas du tout ! On a passé une soirée fabuleuse, ponctuée d'éclats de rire majestueux. Des retrouvailles extra. J'ai eu un plaisir fou à les revoir, et je n'aurais échangé ces quelques heures de pur plaisir contre rien au monde. Seul John avait beaucoup changé, mais c'est normal. Les autres n'avaient pas bougé d'un micro-iota, c'en était incroyable.

Je suis prêt à recommencer quand ils veulent. Pour peu que Cojac vienne à nouveau de New York, que John vienne à nouveau de Londres, et que les absents se bougent le popotin. Finalement, le cerveau n'a pas vieilli. Que du bonheur, et j'en redemande.

Saturday 12 June 2004

Nvu 0.30...

...is now available to Linspire users through Click-N-Run. Other platforms will follow in the course of next week.

Note to the hundred people who sent us (either to @nvu.com or directly to me) proposals to participate in L10N efforts : we think 0.30 is the first release stable enough to stand a real localization effort. We are ready to list all the L10N teams, on a per-language basis, on nvudev.org and link all your language packs from nvu.com; if you can't provide hosting, we'll try to host your contribs. Details will follow. Please do not flood us with emails about that right now, I am going to post another article on that topic next week. And thanks a lot for your help, we appreciate it a lot.

Friday 11 June 2004

Classification is the first ennemy

It's by pure (bad) luck I found that page:

Quickly, about the first "comment": this looks a lot like what people post on Parisian Indymediwa or any other French-language "alterglobalist" sites (it's "altermondialiste" in "Molière's language"), or some progressive French-Jewish blogs like Daniel Glazman's Glazblog, which has posts in French (this is a good sample on the same topic), English, and even Yiddish (I assume, as I can't read Hebraic characters).

Uhhhh... The glazblog is a progressist French-Jewish blog... Uhhh... And why not an modern Europeo-Epicurean blog ? Pffffff.....

Nvu progress 20040611

We have a 0.30 RC 1 now.

Il faut sauver le soldat Toubon

Je viens de recevoir - il était grand temps - mon kilo de prospectus électoraux par la Poste. Les papiers de merde habituels. Et puis tiens, non, pas si habituels que cela. Je les ai vraiment parcouru (où est ma médaille ?) et voici ce que j'ai relevé:

  1. la liste UMP a pour tête de liste un inconnu de la société civile, mais place en position élligible deux soldats qu'il faut sauver. Nicole Fontaine, évacuée du gouvernement Raffari, et surtout Jacques Toubon à qui les hélicoptères népalais n'ont pas valu que du succès. Allez, ça vaut bien un maroquin à Bruxelles.
  2. la liste "La France d'en bas", dont je n'avais jamais entendu parler, est menée par le comédien Bernard Menez!!! Consternifiant.
  3. la liste du Front National mentionne en douzième position un certain Alain Gallais. On le voit à peine sur la photo, à deux rangs derrière la fille du Menhir. Alain Gallais est la brebis galeuse de ma promotion de Polytechnique... L'a toujours été d'extrême droite, est conseiller municipal FN. Berk.
  4. la liste "Europe Démocratie Espéranto" - qui oublie que l'esperanto est bâti presque sur les seules langues indo-européennes avec une nette préférence pour les langues romanes - ne devait pas avoir les moyens de faire le verso de sa page en esperanto... Y'a pas un seul mot d'esperanto dans leur laïus.
  5. la palme de la connerie monumentale revient sans aucun doute à la liste "Euro-Palestine", dont le comédien Dieudonné est l'image publique, en troisième position sur la liste. Le premier qui dit une saloperie se lavera la bouche au savon de Marseille. Update: je jure que la coïncidence est totale. Je suis tombé dessus juste après avoir écrit mon article.
  6. la list "Action pour tous", eureuze gagnenthe du khonquours du plu grend nonbre de fôtes d'aurtograf et gramère. En plus c'est totalement inintelligible, le gars qui a pondu ça a le neurone qui flanche, c'est très clair.

Voila, c'est tout pour aujourd'hui, je suis un peu pris par Nvu 0.30.

Thursday 10 June 2004

Nvu progress 20040610

  • new table insertion dialog :-)

    new table insertion dialog

  • 0.30 RC1 on its way

Tombé dans un guet-apens

Ce matin, juste avant mon rendez-vous de 9:15, je prenais un petit café vite fait à la terasse d'un bistro. S'installent à ma gauche six nanas de 35-40 ans qui venaient de déposer leurs enfants à l'école voisine. Extraits:

  • qu'est-ce que tu fais aujourd'hui ? shopping ? on va à Parly 2, c'est climatisé...
  • non, pas aujourd'hui, je suis un peu fatiguée
  • moi, je vais à la piscine
  • encore ta phobie des kilos en trop hein ?
  • meuh non, il fait chaud, c'est tout!
  • Lise, ça te dit d'aller draguer le mec à Paris ?
  • ah ouais d'accord, parfait, mon mari est pas là en ce moment, et mon fils mange à la cantine
  • et les filles, pas besoin d'aller à Paris, y'a un charmant jeune homme juste à votre droite
  • arrête, quand il nous a vu arriver, il a du prendre peur
  • oui, nous prendre sur les genoux, c'est pas une sinécure!
  • tu rigoles trop fort, ça lui aurait percé les tympans!
  • eh, toi, obsédée par ton poids, tu lui aurais bouzillé les jambes
  • ça serait dommage, non ?

A ce stade, j'étais tout rouge et je souriais bêtement. Elles étaient hilares et riaient aux éclats de leurs taquineries. Heureusement, l'heure du rendez-vous m'a sorti de ce traquenard... A moi ma hargne, et mon courroux, coucou !

PS: ça m'étonnerait beaucoup que Babelfish sache traduire le titre :-)

Arrêt sur Image

Mardi soir, pendant Soir 3, reportage sur le G8 à Sea Island. L'image, c'est Christian Malar qui nous parle, dixit l'incrustation, "en direct depuis Sea Island". Mais l'image nous montre en fait Savannah, à (excusez du peu) 130 kilomètres au nord, où la totalité de la presse est "parquée" sans pouvoir se rapprocher plus du lieu du G8.

Voila, c'est tout. J'aime la précision.

Wednesday 9 June 2004

Future of HTML and the Web, part 1.1

A must-read by Brendan Eich, who seem to be puzzled to learn JavaScript is the worst invention of all times. Brendan, if you happen to read this, this link is for you ;-)

Nvu progress 20040609

  • First build of Nvu 0.30, based on 1.7rc3, done today. No build problem at all, no merging conflict at all. Torture tests start now
  • I need your help... As I wrote earlier, Nvu now has a "tip of the day" window. I have written a few tips but I'd be happy to integrate more contributions, your contributions. Please submit your contributions as a comment to this post. A contribution should be made of two parts : a short (yes, I really mean short) title supposed to end the question "Do you know that..." and a description made of a few lines of text (maximum). Thanks!
  • Fixed two bugs in document's language and document's direction handling.

Fed up

I am fed up with these politically correct times. I hope November will bring back the 21st century to "normal".

are URLs meaningful?

Our friend Karl Dubost is asking himself two good questions... Do URLs have a meaning? Should URLs be readable? If you have followed what TBL has always said about it, the answer is no. URLs are adresses, not names; names are URNs. After all, if you don't speak french and I give you the address "10 rue du Pas de la Mule", that's a bit cryptic. Or if you don't speak swedish, "valhallavägen" means nothing to you, right? Similarly, "acounting.html.fr" means nothing to french readers if they don't speak english and don't understand the word "accounting".

Karl uses that argument to confirm URLs have no meaning. I am happy to object and believe exactly the contrary:

  1. First, if "accounting" means nothing in french, it is meaningful in english. The example is not "f14hjGhghjGX.html", it's "accounting.html". In at least one language, it is meaningful. And why is it a real word? Read below.
  2. Probably because humans are only humans, and it's probably the basis of human nature to give everything a meaning. URLs are not an exception here. You cannot expect people are not going to give a meaning to an address, in particular when that address must be human-readable to be published, copied, and so on. Right, URLs are used that way because we don't have URNs.
  3. And to be honest, usable URNs exist only in ISBN and TBL's dreams (well... and Amazon's ASINs). I am not sure we will ever see web user agents able to retrieve documents from URNs. Unless we switch to a system like AOL's but I think it is very unlikely...

As a conclusion, yes, I think URLs should be considered meaningful. Just like addresses. And yes, multiple addresses can target the same resource. Just like "rue de Mons" / "Bergenstraat" in Belgium. In Karl's example, the fr_FR version of accounting.html.en is accounting.html.fr. Why? The localization system on server side should allow accounting.html and comptabilité.html (please note the e acute) to be redirected to accounting.html.en and comptabilité.html.fr depending on user's preferences. Meaningful URLs are not bad; server configuration is;-)

Tuesday 8 June 2004

Un autre Monde, une farce cachée

Quelque chose m'échappe. Le Monde, ses différentes sociétés, administrateurs, rédac'chef et tout le tuttim laissent donc tomber leurs plaintes en diffamation contre les auteurs de la Face Cachée du Monde en échange de la non-publication de nouvelles éditions ; et toute cette clique clame "notre honneur est lavé". Très très étrange en vérite. S'ils étaient si sûrs de leur bon droit, si la diffamation était, comme cela a été affirmé, si facile à démontrer, si le livre était un tel tissu de mensonges et de haîne, mais pourquoi donc ne préfèrent-ils pas que l'honneur soit officiellemen lavé par la Justice ? Le livre a été vendu à plus de deux cent mille exemplaires, une édition de poche à la veille de l'été, période propice aux lectures de poche, aurait fait sans aucun doute du tort aux finances du Monde, déjà en très mauvaise santé. D'un autre côté, l'éditeur et les auteurs auraient certainement du engager de lourdes dépenses en Défense si aucune transaction n'avait été trouvée.

Non, décidément, j'ai peut-être l'esprit mal tourné, mais rien, non rien dans cet accord amiable ne semble en faveur du célèbre quotidien francophone, gothique et vespéral (plus trop vespéral d'ailleurs puisqu'il est souvent disponible autour de 13h, alors que c'était 17h00 quand j'étais adolescent...).

Future of HTML and the Web, part 1

My friend Tantek has told me I should spend a few cycles reading the minutes of the recent Workshop on Web Applications and Compound Documents. I read what Hixie wrote about it, I read his position paper, and I read a few private comments some friends shared with me. But I did not read all the position papers. So let me first summarize what I think should be the future of the Web here, without being influenced by these papers. Warning, if you are a regular visitor of this blog, you'll see below a few things you have already read.

Continue reading...

Monday 7 June 2004

ROFL

Totalement crétin, mais totalement mort de rire :-D Et vive le Wysiwyg!

Nvu progress 20040607

  • Improved the font-face menu and dropdown; the system font list is now queried only once.
  • switched to "polish" mode, 0.30 is approaching

Private Message for the Photobiker

Got the message :-) Made me laugh a lot :-) Hey, the whole thing is your fault, after all :-)

Give more news when you can! Mille mercis!

Firefox's new theme

That's Mozilla.org's decision and I have no comment to make about it; I only have a side comment about Nvu : I am glad I did not spend time to move Nvu to a Qute-like theme, as a lot of people requested. As a matter of fact, I really like Nvu's current look and I do believe I have much more important stuff to do for the moment.

Update: urrrgggggghhhh... Let's say I won't be commenting Mozilla.org's decision but will be commenting Winstripe theme itself : don't read the text here, just look at screenshots; Qute 0.1 first, Qute as of today, and finally Winstripe as of today. Scary, really scary.

Friday 4 June 2004

Last day

This is the last day I work alone at the office. Laurent will join on monday. Woooza!

Please clean *your* backyard first

The US are going to release four persons of french citizenship currently detained in Guantanamo. Whatever they did (or did not... remember a few UK citizens were recently released from Guantanamo and the UK authorities just let them go, saying there was no charge at all against them...), these four persons were detained during years in total denial of their civil rights, under the bill of a country's president that is almost certainly illegal according to the international treaties. And guess what? Washington has sent the French Foreign Office an official diplomatic note requiring that Paris confirms these four persons will be, personal translation of AFP's news report, treated with dignity in full respect of the French Law!!!! Bush will be in France tonight or tomorrow for the D-Day's celebrations, and he'll meet Chirac. In diplomatic words, that diploatic note is called a snub. In less diplomatic words, that's called a slap in the face, and I can imagine Chirac tonight thundering forth against Bush. And you know what? I agree with him.

The French have no problems at all with US citizens. But my american friends should really dump their current president to /dev/null.

In the meantime, heads are falling in the Bush administration... CIA's number one, George Tenet resigns because he wants to spend more time with his family (thanks to CIA's excellent reports of WMD and 9/11), CIA's deputy director for operations is retiring (thanks to spy name's leak). Who's next?

Nvu progress 20040604

I found an excellent work spot... I had this morning to take my car to CarGlass to change the windscreen and fix something on one of the windows. So I spent two hours and a half there with my laptop. No telephone, no email. The result is below. It already works very well but I still have to add the corresponding menu items.

Direction control buttons

Thursday 3 June 2004

Give Caesar What Belongs to Caesar

BlockNote.net is...uhhh.. an HTML editor. Yes, one could say a competitor to Nvu :-) It's a commercial product. It's really for beginners and it's quite weak but it has a fast rendering/editing engine and a few remarkable UI stuff that need to be quoted as such:

  • the table insertion dialog; I really like it
  • the table manipulation UI; I love it. I am really jealous here, BlockNote.net's author has used a superb metaphor, and I find it better than my inline table editing thingies

Nvu progress 20040603

  • more bidi work
  • integrated the tipoftheday widget

    Nvu tip of the day

  • spellchecker now enabled

Wednesday 2 June 2004

oh really?

Hey Ian, what did you expect?

First, the only sustained spontaneous clapping of the entire day came as someone suggested, in response to my brief statement of how backwards compatibility is critical, that it was about time to drop HTML and Windows IE6 from the roadmap.

So I can assume from that that most people don't agree with the whole backwards-compatibility thing!

Drop 99% of the web and 90% of the browsers. Yeah, let's do that tomorrow :-)

Nvu progress 20040602

  • pref panel for bidi control in new pages
  • corresponding chrome JS when a new document is created
  • corresponding XUL in Page properties

Preferences with bidi control

I prefer cigars

That guy can turn a pretzel into a deadly weapon and he is allowed to keep a pistol ? :-)

Microsoft vs. Lindows : 0 / 1

Microsoft just lost its case in the Netherlands! Excerpt from Lindows Inc's communiqué:

The Amsterdam District Court ruled on May 27, 2004 in favor of Lindows, Inc. on all counts in Microsoft's second attempt for a preliminary injunction on trademark infringement and has ordered Microsoft to pay Lindows 944 Euros. The court agreed with Lindows that not every use of the trade name Lindows infringes on the trademark "windows". Visit www.linspire.com/microsoftfine for a copy of the ruling in English.

"This victory is quite a turnaround because Microsoft had asked for a daily fine of 100,000 euros to be levied against us and instead they are the ones required to pay," said Michael Robertson, chief executive officer of Lindows, Inc. "We hope Microsoft can move past these legal tactics and learn to compete in the marketplace rather than the courtroom."

According to the ruling Lindows has complied with the use of the trade name and can continue to use the name Lindows on a limited basis, accompanied at all times with the additional phrase that Lindows is not affiliated with "windows" in any way. Since the trade name Lindows is still legal outside the Benelux and the use of the name does not justify a competitive advantage, the court concluded that the use does not contravene the prior judgement nor the settlement agreement. The court could not require nor was it obligated to have Lindows adapt its trade name outside the Benelux, ruling there was no infringing use of the trade name, and therefore denying Microsoft's claim and ordering the company to pay Lindows 944 Euros.

This ruling permits Lindows to resume sales in the Benelux countries. [...]

In 2003, Microsoft took its lawsuit overseas regarding MS Windows trademark infringement while the same issues were being heard in United States courts. In response to Microsoft's lawsuits worldwide and to continue operating overseas, Lindows changed its product name and website address in April 2004 to Linspire. Microsoft then filed a second request for a preliminary injunction in Amsterdam stating that Lindows was continuing to infringe on their trademark based on small print use of the trade name. Currently no products are being sold under the Lindows or Linspire name into the Netherlands and the term "Lindows" is not used on the website except as required for corporate and copyright identification purposes.

I think this ruling is going to have a strong effect on the similar trials in France and Sweden. This is clearly a major flaw in MSFT's copyright on the generic word "windows".

Finally!

Yes finally someone understood the real difficulties behind a generic XML editor. So many people (including inside the World Wide Web Consortium itself) care only about the browsing side and not about the editing one. Alex, fortunately, there are a few solutions to the problem. And these solutions are old and well-known in the SGML/XML community. But expect us to be disruptive again, we have a few ideas in mind ;-)

Tuesday 1 June 2004

Nvu progress 20040601

Class assignment to the selection: done :-) Now working on bug fixes and bidi.