<Glazblog/>

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.

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.

Bon, ça commence à prendre forme.

Je rendrai publique en début de semaine prochaine une extension à Firefox permettant de programmer des enregistrements sur sa FreeboxHD. Entièrement en XUL évidemment, je n'encapsule pas un navigateur affichant les pages de Free.. Stay tuned !

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.

I noticed you can't reach the contents of the trash from the Finder unless you open directly the Trash clicking on its icon. But there's a rather simple way to see it in all Finder windows: first, use a tool like OnYx to show hidden files and directories (Parameters > Finder > Show hidden files and directories), then open the Finder, go to your home directory and drag the .Trash directory onto your sidebar. Click on the Trash icon in your dock. Click on the trash icon in the toolbar of the window and copy it with Cmd-C. Right-click on your .Trash entry in the sidebar and select the menu to show the details of the file. Click on the icon at the top of the information window (just below the titlebar) and paste the Trash icon using Cmd-V. Don't rename the folder... Use OnYx again to go back to the former state of the Finder with hidden files and dirs really hidden (if that's what you prefer). Done.

There's a minor nit: you don't see the "Empty trash" button.

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.

L'informaticien aurait tout bonnement piraté le système d'information de la banque fin 2008 alors qu'il travaillait encore pour l'établissement, et subtilisé le fichier clients. Il serait ensuite rendu en France pour remettre cette liste au fisc de façon anonyme. Suite à une plainte déposée par la banque, une enquête a été ouverte en Suisse.

Comment dire ? MORT DE RIRE !!! Un ministre receleur, ça la fout mal, et ça risque de bien plomber les procédures de redressement !

Je suis déjà assez étonné de voir un tel article (sic...) sur lemonde.fr. Une video, de France24, siglée France24, légendée "Images: LeMonde.fr" (uuuuh ?). Mais quand on passe à cet autre article (re-sic), qui ne fait que repiquer un reportage vidéo de CNN, en anglais, non sous-titré et non traduit, de la gueule de qui LeMonde.fr se fout-il ? Cela fait bien longtemps que je trouve que l'image de Une de LeMonde.fr est souvent, très souvent, bien trop souvent exactement la même que celle de CNN mais là LeMonde.fr est en train de suivre le chemin de son édition papier...

Exactement comme avant l'arrivée du 3GS, Orange est en train de contacter tous ses clients disposant d'une vieille version de l'iPhone pour leur proposer une offre spéciale de migration vers le 3GS. Des points en plus, des tarifs préférentiels, comme d'habitude. Bref, Orange qui a réussi à se défaire de son stock de 3GS 16Go a par contre peur de se retrouver avec des invendus de 3GS 32Go qui partent nettement moins bien à cause de leur prix. La braderie Orange les amène au prix du 16Go, évidemment en échange d'un engagement de 12 ou 24 mois. Mais clairement, ça sent encore une fois le "passons en flux tendus sur la version qui sera obsolète dans quelques mois quand les rumeurs de l'iPhone 3.1 vont grossir et toucher tout le monde". Un indice de plus s'il en fallait encore un.