afongen

Scott Andrew LePera’s posting lots of good Mozilla links today. The archived version to which I just pointed doesn’t have his design homage to Mozilla, so hit his home page if you’re reading this today.

From the “For Web Developers” page linked to from the new Mozilla 1.0 start page, I found the Mozilla source generator sidebar, which generates formatted HTML source based on the current page’s DOM. Interesting idea.

One complaint: the output is HTML, not XHTML, even on XHTML pages: the tags are upper-case. This does most decidedly not mean that this is not a useful tool. I think it just needs a bit of tweaking.

Take note of the instructions to add this line to your prefs.js:

user_pref("signed.applets.codebase_principal_support", true);

The script that runs in the sidebar needs elevated permissions, which this preference setting allows.

Note, too, among the documents, a Guide to Mozilla 1.0, which brings together links to some very useful information.

You’ve probably seen it elsewhere, but I have to mention it: Mozilla 1.0 has been released.

Those simple words do not do justice to my excitement.

Apocalypse 5 is out, dealing with regular expressions in Perl 6. Whew!

And it’s looking like there’s a slim chance that I’ll be able to go to the O’Reilly Open Source Convention this summer and see Larry et al talk about Perl 6. Crossing my fingers.

“You don’t survive the cola wars without some kick-ass ninja moves.”

Damn straight.

For some reason, that just cracked me up. The best I’ve read there yet, though: Apple Executives Selling Stock, Buying Puppy. “I told them that a puppy is a huge responsibility that you can’t just throw $19.5 million at. Who’s going to feed it? Who’s going to walk it?”

New three-column design. I made the “mistake” of implementing it without testing in IE/Windows. 8 hours later, settled in at work, I give it a shot in IE6/Win and a couple sections overlap. Stupid friggin’ browser.

I should not be so quick to judge. As I keep pointing out to a colleague of mine who criticizes what Mozilla does to his designs, just because a browser does not act as you expect does not mean that it is wrong. It’s quite possible — probable, even — that in my tweaking here and there I broke something. It’s also possible, of course, that I need some weird workaround for a bug in IE6. I very much would like to avoid ugly hack workarounds, so I may end up having to go to a simpler design.

Just as well, because while thinking about how to fix it I realized that I’m not sure I want a three-column design. So after a quick workaround, back to the drawing board…

Update: for the record, it’s a problem with IE. So there.

Reading about <link>ed RSS feeds, I’m interested. Good idea. “Say, Sam,” I tell myself, “why don’t you check that out with Mozilla’s Site Navigation Toolbar?” A fine idea. But I can’t find it. In vain I methodically check through the preferences. Oh, great. It’s not in the Mac builds. I thought I remembered it there, but maybe not. Hm, maybe on OS X. Nope. Rats.

Wait! Release notes! Maybe I can dig through the release notes and find out whether it’s available for the Mac. Hey, there it is:

The Site Navigation Bar, also known as the Link Toolbar, is not available for this release. (Bug 138496)

Ah. No one has it in RC3. Bummer.

Fink, a project for bringing open source Unix software to Mac OS X, is making KDE available for OS X. Oh yeah. It’s still experimental, though (that is, “There are no guarantees that it won’t delete your hard drive, kill your dog, put water in your gas tank, or make parts of your body randomly explode.”). Doesn’t mean it isn’t good for a lark.