Dylan Schiemann

The day began at Google building 44 with a brief introduction by Mitchell Baker about how well the mozilla foundation is doing. It was also rumored that mozilla is going to leave the software business and enter the t-shirt business after selling an astounding 15,000 shirts at Linux World and OSCON.

The mozilla developer day began at Google building 44 with a brief introduction by Mitchell Baker and Chris Hofmann about how well the mozilla foundation is doing. It was also rumored that mozilla is going to leave the software business and enter the t-shirt business after selling an astounding 15,000 shirts at Linux World and OSCON.

The first real talk was given my Mike Shaver and Brendan Eich (the original author of the JavaScript language). Neither of them had any sleep prior to their talk so it was a very amusing, humorous, and delerious talk about the current plans for mozilla (Shaver was found at lunch time sleeping on the sofa downstairs). Key points made are as follows:

• Some SVG support will ship with a mozilla release around the end of 2004, in either version 1.8 or 1.9
• mozilla 2.0 is targeted for Q4 2005
• They are working on a meta object protocol to share JavaScript across multiple languages (which reminded us of Mark Anderson's JS-DOM for command line JSUnit testing.
• Narcissus – A unified front end for JavaScript
• E4X is coming… not sure I like this (basically it is BEA Systems' syntax for bringing xml concepts to DOM calls to bring brevity to some DOM calls for things like traversals, literals, filtering, and querying. For example, document..someElement uses .. to represent a descendant operator much like an xpath call.
• They're looking to add some of the what-wg extensions to forms such as Web Forms 2 and Web Apps 1, and also XForms Basic.
• As shown with their browser-based presentation, a prototype for the apple:canvas element was developed this week and provides web developers with a quick and dirty way to do drawing and animations from JavaScript as a short term solution until SVG support arrives.

The next speaker was Robert O'Callahan who showed some of the more recent advances with mozilla, including how to create a transparent window with xul apps, and also showing some svg examples. He expects that mozilla 1.8 or 1.9 will contain a version of mozilla with svg enabled that has full integration with DOM and CSS. There was also a demonstration of an implementation for the CSS 3 Multicolumn layout proposal.

Accessibility in web sites and web applications was the subject of the next talk by Aaron Leventhal… check out the mozilla accessibility web site. Basically in order for things to be fully accessible, there needs to be a way to specify the who, what, where, when, and state of every object in the DOM. Demonstrations were provided of mozilla using speech readers. Comments were made that mozilla does not make it easy for JavaScript developers to write accessible applications. I asked a question and received the expected response that mozilla keeps things in DOM order, not in the visual order as manipulated by CSS. As I type this, I wonder what happens when you set display:none on an element… or what about visibility:hidden?

The W3C Dynamic Web Content Task Force has been set up to address some of these issues. mozilla recently added code to make any div or span focusable… simply set the tabIndex attribute to -1 so that it isn’t in the tab order, but is still a focusable element.

We then broke for lunch. We stood around and talked with Brendan Eich for a few minutes. As good as the Google catered lunch looked, Chris Wetherell of Google has other plans for us. He gave us (Alex, David and myself) the tour of Google, showing us around the very hip Google offices, showing us the amazing Google Cafe which shows the world how cafeteria food could be done. It reminded me of a simplfied version of the Marche Movenpick that with a little less decor that I enjoyed so much last year in Toronto and Montreal. Chris is the interface developer for some of the more interesting features found in gmail and blogger. The click-screen NDA that I signed doesn't let me say more than this really.

We were a little late returning from lunch, and then ran into Asa Dotzler and Jesse Ruderman in the hallway and had a great talk about mozilla, web developers, features, and more. For those that don't know, Jesse runs one of the best (if not the best) site for web developer bookmarklets, and Asa is a very persuasive evangelist for mozilla.

So after missing the Nigel McFarlane talk, we made it back into the main room in time for Bob Clary's very interesting talk on cross-browser compatibility. Bob and I talked many times a few years ago about cross-browser issues so it was great to finally meet him in person. Bob has been working on a very intriguing project called mozilla-spiders that allows testing of CSS, JavaScript, and other cool things from a XUL app. One thing that is really neat is that you can automate the testing of event handlers on every object in a document. It was also cool in that we learned how to receive css parsing error messages.

Robert returned to the stage to discuss backwards compatibility issues with mozilla… basically asking for input as to how mozilla should treat deprecation, fixing broken features, supporting other browsers, etc. They currently take what was widely agreed as a sensible, pragmatic approach. The biggest complaints were that there needs to be better communication about changes to the developer community, and that there should be a way in css to specify the version (David Baron explained why this wasn't supported)… earlier in the day I also explained why css does not currently specify a way to logically combine relative and absolute units logically… I basically came to the conclusion that the thing we really need is a way for getComputedStyle to return a value in units that are specified. David Baron told us to check out Ian Hickson's proposal for a new way to do getComputedStyle.

The final talk was given by Myk Melez on forumzilla which is a suprisingly cool way of adding rss aggregation to the mozilla mail applications. Basically each rss entry is treated as a new mail message, giving you the capability of using mozilla mail as a way to sort and read your rss feeds. Perhaps the coolest thing about this is that the feature was added exclusively with xml, css, and JavaScript, meaning that no additional C++ code was needed to add such significant functionality to mozilla.

Several demos were then given, including a xul app that does some pseudo-real-time shopping comparions, a demo by David Baron showing how to use a new mozilla css extension for user style sheets to specify style based on domain (which I asked the humorous question of, wouldn't this be a way of specifying new rules for mozilla 1.8+ since it was enabled for all css documents.

Then we had to take off so I could catch a plane home for the weekend. Overall it was a very interesting day as it gave me a lot of cool anecdotal information about mozilla in a short amount of time. The Foundation put on a great day and I really enjoyed being there. Thanks to Informatica for allowing me to attend this great event.