/bin/sleep

glazou — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 09:14:00 +0200

Comments are closed for three weeks on the glazblog.

An Update on CSS 2.1

glazou — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 22:22:00 +0200

So where are we (that "we" meaning the CSS Working Group) on CSS 2.1? In short, we're making fast and excellent progress:

we are currently resolving the last outstanding issues ; almost all our weekly conference calls are entirely dedicated to CSS 2.1
the Test Suite is near completion ; the Working Group has decided, given the size of the Test Suite, that it's not realistic to review individually all tests before saying the Test Suite is completed. We will declare the Test Suite ready for implementation reports and will fix individual bugs when reported buggy by testers, browser vendors, the community, whoever. On a more personal note, I think it's the only reasonable way of dealing with a Test Suite that contains thousands and thousands of tests, some of them rather complex not only to write but also to understand when you read them. Otherwise, the review and validation process of all these tests alone will take ages...
given the recent changes in the spec - we resolved a lot of issues some of them pretty complicated - we may have to go back to Last Call Working Draft and then back to CR again. That's not a problem and can be relatively fast.
the current CR exit criteria - that we don't plan to change - are very clear (see conditions 4 and 5). The CR period could be a bit long though; we'll see.
the Test Suite and the CR should be available at same time and that time should be, as planned by the WG, after the summer. That should leave us enough time to reach Proposed Recommendation before the end of the year, as expected.

To the people who could complain about the duration of this process and the time needed to make this spec appear as a REC, let me say that we have a lot, really a lot of work here. The WG focuses almost solely on CSS 2.1 at this time and that's not recent. 2.1 must be released as a Web Standard because that's one of the current cornerstones of the architecture of the World Wide Web. We cannot make the next steps, CSS 3 even module by module, happen without 2.1 before.

In summary, we're on track. As expected. No reason to worry.

Thanks.

Daniel Glazman, W3C CSS Working Group, Co-chair

Update: reposted on W3C blog.

Dream...

glazou — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 10:57:00 +0200

If there is a browser feature I would like to see appear some day, it's the following one: when I want to listen to a radio or watch a TV channel that reflects real-time its broadcast through a flash plugin in a web page (for example http://france-info.com/), I need to keep the browser running and a tab for that page. I'd love to see a trivial UI way to "detach" the running flash player and make it a totally independent (and of course closeable) window...

Thunderbird 3.1

glazou — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 15:29:00 +0200

There is something new and totally unexpected in that 3.1 I just installed on my Mac Book Pro through the update mechanism: the monospace font I'm using, I've been using for the last twenty (even 24) years reading plain/text email, Courier, is gone and Thunderbird seems to force me to switch to Menlo... I really wonder who had that excellent idea. Suddenly, my eyes are not used to the email font any more, and reading a message is less automatic.

Changing the default font is not a harmless thing. It impacts readability, accessibility, habits. It should never be done w/o asking the user. I consider this change as a strategic mistake because TB asked me nothing.

Menlo 12	Courier 13

I'm immediately switching back to Courier through the Preferences panel. And I would recommend switching back TB3.1 distros to the original font.

Update: the first comment below makes me wonder if people will really understand why this is a bad change. My font choices are mine, strictly mine. The software does not have the right to force a change here w/o prompting me. Would Firefox force a change on someone's userContent.css or in the preferred background/foreground colors? Clearly no. So why is it acceptable for Thunderbird?

3D

glazou — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 21:39:00 +0200

Movies go 3D ; television goes 3D ; game console like Nintendo DS goes 3D ; if the 3D glasses become popular, I think we'll unfortunately see 3D web sites arrive... sigh.

XUL rotator

glazou — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 16:36:00 +0200

I'm currently implementing CSS 3 2D Transforms in BlueGriffon so I needed a xul control for rotation... It's not totally ironed but it's already very usable (Minefield nightly needed). Feel free to reuse/modify it, it's released under MPL.

The new Extension Manager

glazou — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 13:36:00 +0200

I saw the new extension manager land in BlueGriffon a while ago after an hg pull. Since BlueGriffon is a xulrunner-based app and not a browser, the extension manager still appears there inside a dialog and I certainly don't want it to show as a tab. So let's take a look at that new manager inside Firefox, my browser window being maximized on a 15"4 MBP (and that is the normal behaviour for the vast majority of MBP users):

I have many comments to make here:

lots and lots of unused space, the eye has to move far too much from left to right to capture all the information relative to a given add-on,
the "Update add-ons" link feels like a poor man's solution compared to the number of rounded buttons, gradient backgrounds and so on. It really feels nobody knew where to put it and the header was the only reasonable option but then a button was not reasonable there... Eh.
please notice that the entry for add-on "Freerecord" shows all information about it and the version number is not even shown. On another hand, the rating seems to be super-mega-important since it's on first line! Hum, to say the least.
"Get add-ons" has really nothing to do with the other entries on the left hand side. The icon is a shopping bag and that's probably a bad choice for what is really a catalog with a search engine and a download button.
the left hand side list uses both "add-ons" and "extensions"...
the Name/Size/Last Updated column headers are still visible if you resize the window enough to make appear a horizontal scrollbar; in that case, the headers are not standing above the corresponding information
the filtering options are limited; it's not possible to filter based on compatibility/incompatibility, update available/up-to-date, enabled/disabled
the "show more" click-foo-schmurtz-thingy does not really show a lot more... you have to double-click on the entry to really learn more on a given entry... it took me a while to discover that option
placing a "install add-on" button for xulrunner-based non-browsing apps in this page is a real pain. It really does not fit.
sorry to say, but on my Mac, it's ugly. It's does not look mac'ish at all, and I am no mac UI fanatic at all.
it does not easily allow third-party catalogs for extensions/themes/search engines

I then spent a few cycles drawing a mockup of what would be a nice extension manager for me under Mac OS X. First, it would not be tab and would remain a dialog because my screen is too wide for such a manager as a tab... Then, please excuse my extremely poor graphical skills and do not focus on the pixel-precise thing, here's the thing:

You can see my remarkable drawing skills at the top of that image... I just could not draw something satisfactory for the hierarchy.

It's basically a hierarchical list with a search field and the classical add/remove/config mac buttons for a list, plus a throbber on the right bottom hand side. The hierarchy of data is:

all
- installed
  - add-ons / languages / search engines / themes / plugins
    - all / enabled / disabled / incompatible / update available
- available in AMO's catalog
  - add-ons / languages / search engines / themes / plugins
    - featured / recommended / category 1 / category 2 / ...
- available in another repository
- available in another repository
- ...
result of a search

Search is contextual: if you're browsing data in the user's profile, it searches in the user's profile; AMO if AMO is browsed; both if the display is currently "All".

Advantages:

extensible to third-party repositories
less unused space
hierarchical navigation metaphore
more filtering capacity
the "Install" button has a natural position, it can be very easily hidden; that + button could not only install from file but also from URL...
the toolbar at the bottom of the list has room for more buttons/features if needed
the config button can be a menubutton and hold Detailed Information / Update selected add-on(s) / Select all
the throbber shows clearly network activity in a central location instead of dispatching a throbber per entry in the add-ons list, making them hidden if the entry is not in the viewport... clicking on an active throbber could stop the update process.

It's not perfect but I find it more adapted to my needs than the current extension manager. I am not saying this is how the extension manager should be, I'm just saying the current one has a few flaws and here are my personal wishes.

Update: apparently, add-ons installation through copy of an XPI package into the extensions/ dir in my profile is still horked. And since the "Install add-on" button is not here yet, xulrunner-based app authors are in the merde, as we commonly say on this side of the Atlantic...

Interview of Wolfgang Kriesing at SWDC 2010

glazou — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 15:06:00 +0200

Interview of Wolfgang Kriesing about Mobile Web Apps during SWDC 2010.

Interview of Chris Heilmann at SWDC 2010

glazou — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 12:41:00 +0200

Interview of Chris Heilmann from Yahoo! at SWDC 2010.

Interview of Rik Arends at SWDC 2010

glazou — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 10:03:00 +0200

Interview of Rik Arends about Ajax.org during SWDC 2010.

Interview of Dylan Schiemann at SWDC 2010

glazou — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 09:38:00 +0200

Interview of Dylan Schiemann about Dojo during SWDC 2010.

Interview of Robert Nyman at SWDC 2010

glazou — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 09:19:00 +0200

Robert Nyman interviewed on HTML5 during SWDC 2010.

Windows7 and an old laptop

glazou — Mon, 31 May 2010 13:17:00 +0200

This week-end, I reinstalled a rather old laptop, a Dell Latitude D610, that was totally dying under Windows XP sp3. It was so slow that it was almost unusable. Opening an hyperlink from Thunderbird or Instant Messenging gave you enough time to turn on the espresso machine, make a coffee and drink it. Awful. Defrag did nothing, cleanup did not help, there were no useless daemons or software installed. Just dying.

I first added some fresh memory, expanding to 2Gigs, verified it almost did not help XP and then installed the Windows7 diagnosis tool, available from Microsoft's web site; it reported an issue with the Intel wireless driver and the audio driver. I went to Intel's and Dell's web site to download the two Vista drivers (no specific Windows7 driver available in both cases) and started upgrading to Windows7.

30 minutes later, and after installing the two drivers, the laptop is young again. I mean it's really fast and usable again, and all XP software that were originally installed still run perfectly under 7 (though after a needed reinstallation). I restored all the personal accounts (mail, IM, ...) and could delete the Windows.old directory.

Very nice. Congrats Microsoft.

Bill Gates and the Web

glazou — Mon, 31 May 2010 13:04:00 +0200

Extract from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's web site:

" You are not permitted to link or shortcut to our Site from your Web site, blog or similar application, without obtaining prior written permission from us. "

Oh, I just made a link to their web site... Oooops. Pffff....

Tantek Çelik becomes a Mozillian !!!

glazou — Wed, 26 May 2010 15:38:00 +0200

Wow, just wow !!! But hey, after all, I shouldn't be surprised Welcome onboard my friend !

Actia Automotive, Web Media Group

glazou — Fri, 21 May 2010 18:30:00 +0200

Disruptive Innovations is glad to welcome ACTIA Automotive and the Web Media Group as new customers.

Congratulations Microsoft

glazou — Fri, 14 May 2010 11:15:00 +0200

Yes, sincere congrats. Well done. The second beta preview of IE9 implements all of CSS 3 Selectors. It even implements (without a -ms-* prefix Microsoft has really a problem with vendor prefixes...) the ::selection pseudo-element. It passes all my own Selectors test. It's even said to pass 100% of the Selectors Test Suite (an Implementation Report would be useful here, please) ! Wooohooo !!! For the record, former versions of IE were so bad at that Test Suite that adding them to the Implementation Report was pointless.

This is not only good news for IE9, it's good news for the whole Web. Microsoft is putting so much energy and "new" features inside IE9 that it's going to be a major incentive to drop former versions of IE and move to v9.

One (big) nit though: IE9 is only available for Vista and 7... While zillions of users, and in particular corporations, still use XP and don't plan to drop it any time soon. The unavailability of IE9 on XP will be a (big) slowdown factor to the obsolescence of IE6, 7 and 8. And I don't like that. I don't care about the tech reasons for that (graphics hardware acceleration bla bla), I don't like that at all. Un rendez-vous manqué.

Powered by Mozilla, followup

glazou — Mon, 10 May 2010 17:41:00 +0200

I am about to add a "Powered by Mozilla" logo to bluegriffon.org (as soon as I get back the formal authorization). But I stick to my original comment about that "Powered by Mozilla" beast: it's not the right logo at all.

WebKit and CSS 3 Namespaces #2

glazou — Thu, 06 May 2010 12:34:00 +0200

In fact the bug was totally different, with a side-effect on @import and @namespaces : the tokenizer of WebKit did not accept at-rule identifiers nor "url(" with escaped characters... Test syntax-006.xml of the CSS 3 Namespaces Test Suite was then failing because the @namespace rule in the first line was thrown away (escaped char inside the url ident) and the @import rule on the second line was then valid instead of being invalid... So here's my first WebKit patch. It misses the bug URL in the Changelog and an automated test, but I did not have more time to give to WebKit today. If someone else wants to fix my patch for review, no problem.

With that fix in, WebKit fails only one last test in the CSS 3 Namespaces Test Suite while Safari 4.0.5 fails 6 tests...

WebKit and CSS 3 Namespaces

glazou — Wed, 05 May 2010 16:00:00 +0200

The CSS 3 Namespaces specification has only one implementation passing all tests (Firefox at his time). WebKit appears to be near completion, failing only two tests (@namespace error handling and invalid ordering of @namespace and @import). I think I have a fix for the latter bug:

Nevermind.