As usual, Matthew Thomas is on the money with his concerns about the recent addition of animated rendering of the Marquee tag in Mozilla. Where’s this lunacy stop? I don’t know. The box has been opened. Perhaps it will lead next to ActiveX controls in Mozilla. Support for ActiveX would be both a blessing and a curse. Being able to embed some of the Internet Explorer controls, particularly the HTML editor, would be nice. It might also serve to even out the differences between IE and Mozilla, particularly on intranets. With the growing capabilities of DHTML, ActiveX is becoming less and less necessary, though. Even if Mozilla had ActiveX support it would still lack support for IE’s document.all DOM. But then that could be added, too. Please…

Make the madness stop…

Yes, I promise, this is the last time I’ll use the Marquee tag.

Doc Searls suggests that AOL should open the protocol to AOL Instant Messenger or adopt the Jabber protocol. He writes:

AOL Instant Messenger is a client-only lock-in that will be undermined totally once the Jabber protocol (or some other IM protocol) ubiquitizes into the same grade of Internet infrastructure as SMTP and POP3 provide for mail service and HTTP provides for Web service.

I agree that it is inevitable that instant messaging protocols will eventually be opened. It would be the best for AOL to open up all their protocols as it would give them an immediate advantage and help them become the standard.

Opening just the AOL client protocol is missing the point (and it has already been mostly reverse-engineered as well as licensed twice). Much more interesting and useful is to open the protocol that AOL uses to communicate between servers. To be able to bridge instant messaging systems at the server level opens up a whole world of possibilities. It would allow variation in clients while still supporting interoperability. It would allow differences in protocol that might not be included in the standard, such as different encryption formats or additional features. An extensible protocol could allow some of this, although adding new data encryption techniques after the fact while maintaining interoperability would likely be difficult or impossible. Opening the server protocol would also allow more secure, inside-the-firewall servers that have their own unique features and configurations, such as message logging (a legal requirement in some industries).

Blatant plug for the company: Lotus Sametime already offers many of these “fit for business” requirements as well as AOL Instant Messenger compability.

It looks like Dean Peters of the Heal Your Church Web Site that I mentioned earlier has heard from BibleGateway about XML support. It appears they somewhat missed that providing an API is different than providing XML-based markup for the scriptures. Of course, they already provide a kind of API through the query string interface. See my Bible Gateway bookmarklet.

Dean, who appears to be keeping busy like I am, has also launched Blogs4God, which is building a list of Christian bloggers.

Basil informs me that some, er, less-enlightened employers require the use of IE and therefore making Mozilla look like that other browser is a Good Thing. In that case, complete the look with the IE icon pack. The same site provides icons suitable for the classic and modern skins.

US News says “Keep an eye on bloggers. The main arena for media criticism is not going to be books, columns, or panel discussions, and it certainly won’t be journalism schools. It will be the Internet.”

Not sure why you’d want to, but you can make Mozilla look like Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE).

Via a circuitous route I stumbled across Doc Searls’s commentary “Cheap Talk: Why Open Source and silence don’t mix” It summarizes the wisdom of The Cluetrain Manifesto:

1. Markets are conversations
2. Talk is cheap
3. Silence is fatal

Open source implicitly trusts and relies the conversations that comprise its markets. This is what makes open source fundamentally different than closed source. Not only can you do more with it (and to it) because everything about it is exposed, but it trusts you enough to disclose all of itself to you….

Open source [is] burning down Development as Usual. Why? Is it just because open source has more Goodness than closed source? No…. Open source has no secrets. It is inherently disclosing. And disclosures start conversations – and then do nothing to stop them.

…

So here’s the clue we’re talking about here: Outside the secret-keepers themselves, there is no demand for secrecy. No market for it. And since markets are conversations, you can’t use secrecy to make a market. Only to prevent one.

I’ve been thinking about this for days since I first read it and had to wade through my browser cache to find it again. Open source is about freedom and relies on rights similar to freedom of the press. Software patents and threats of software patents are dangerous. Having worked with the Mozilla project for years now, I still find it refreshing that they have nothing to hide. The project is developed in the open. Let’s keep the conversation going.

Notes from the Cave (via The Shifted Librarian) suggests that Gen-Xers are evaluating churches based on their use of technology:

Today I had a good conversation with Matt and his wife, Kim, about the unique perspective that Gen-Xers have on church. In particular, Gen-Xers expect far more use of computers and electronic communications such as e-mail, instant messaging, and yes, even PowerPoint.

One of the things that Matt said that really stood out is that he and his wife checked to see whether our church had a web site, and if it didn’t that would have told them a lot about our church. The lack of a web site might have caused them to not come to our church.

…

The conversation inspired many thoughts. One would be, wouldn’t it be cool if churches provided mail servers, message forums, online chats, and web server space for weblogs–tools to extend their community into cyberspace? When a person joined the church they would be given an email address. They would be provided the webloging tools to contribute to the community by providing their own content….

Another thought I had would be to set up the entire church with a wireless LAN. When I say entire church I mean even the sanctuary. Then I would set up an internal web server (effectively building an intranet within the church) and put as much information on that server as I could.

…

All of this is pretty easy to put together, but these ideas also raise an issue. What is needed here is the coordination of this technology in a manner that supports the mission and vision of the church. Corporations encountered this problem ten years ago, and the solution was the Chief Information Officer. I think that real insightful churches looking to meet the needs of Gen-Xers and just plain grow would create their own Chief Information Officer position….

The label doesn’t matter, but the spirit does. The point is that churches today have got to start using technology as a means to reach out to their membership and communicate with them in ways that make sense to the membership.

Um, yeah. The church I attend, St. Athanasius Orthodox Church (OCA), might be looked at as backwards technologically. We still burn oil lamps and beeswax candles and celebrate liturgies that date from the earliest years of Christianity. My priest is fond of pointing out how “earthy” and real Christianity is and how our modern technologies have gotten us so far away from that. This is particularly evident in how distanced we are from death.

On the other hand, my journey to the holy Orthodox church was greatly helped by technology, particularly the many orthodox resources available online. We are blessed with a number of technologically adept members in our parish and could easily set up some of the systems suggested. But I’d have to ask why. It’s missing the point if you’re going to be surfing the web (or intranet) during prayers. I mean, would’t it make more sense to cut down on the distractions? I agree that it makes sense to use modern communications tools (the printing press, phone, email, irc, instant messaging, web sites) to be able to communicate to church members about church events. But that just seems obvious and natural.

It doesn’t matter what kind of site you’re making. Bad design is still bad design. I found an Orthodox Christian, now attending a Baptist church, who rants about icky religious websites and makes some good points about the Divine Liturgy and Greek Orthodoxy not being about Greek culture along the way. It’s not a one-time thing, either. Go see what he has to teach about how to Heal Your Church Web Site. He suggests that church and religious websites need to get on the ball and catch up with current technology. He says that the online Bible sites should have XML-RPC mechanisms in the works, if not already released. I’m definitely going to be spending some time reading this site.

I’m a reluctant and occassional user of Mozilla’s tabbed browsing feature. I agree with Matthew Thomas that tabbed browsing is cluttering the UI of Mozilla. It could have been easily predicted that Open in New Tab would start to appear everywhere that there was Open in New Window. This adds to the complexity of the UI for little gain: new windows and new tabs give almost identical results.

Tabs do have a killer feature that may explain why people enjoy using tabs: open links in background. The idea is simple–instead of having new tabs open and take focus immediately, you can click a few links and have the tabs load while you continue reading the current page. This more closely matches the behavior I want. When reading a page, I often open links in new windows so that I can look at them later and not be distracted from the current page. When doing this with new windows I have to explicitly return focus to my previous page.

Bug 56690 is working to allow background loading of new windows, much like the tabbed browsing feature. As with many UI bugs, there’s more discussion than coding going on. Yesterday, Jesse Ruderman posted a cool bookmarklet that converts all links on a page so that they open in new background windows. Unfortunately they would open in reverse order: the last one clicked would end up being topmost behind the current window. I tweaked his bookmarklet to create a new open behind bookmarklet. Mine places the windows in the background in the order they were clicked; the first one clicked will be the first one visible behind the current window.

I love my Palm IIIxe and work for IBM, so the story in Wired about Palm and IBM joining forces to develop business applications caught my eye. This seems a natural partnership. IBM has offered IBM branded versions of Palm devices for some time.

Blake Ross posted that Netscape has lost focus and proposed that all developers should be required to attend usability testing. He also says that there should be manditory usability testing and UI approval before check ins. Absolutely. Both of these would help improve the product. Even if only the Netscape developers attend usability testing, it would help. It’d be interesting to see Netscape do usability testing to evaluate UI developed outside Netscape.

Blake also mentions the pain of fixing UI bugs. He complains about bickering in bug reports. I feel there’s a place for everybody having a say about the UI. Certainly problems in the UI should and do get feedback. The challenge is to trust knowledgable and skilled UI designers to develop appropriate fixes. Having non-designers debating solutions isn’t profitable and leads to some wacky proposals, as Blake points out. UI review and approval before check ins would make a world of difference. This could be done explicitly, or just by module owners bowing to the UI designers.

I was starting to get worried about agreeing so much with Blake. But it makes perfect sense now. The world is ending.

Asa pointed to a somewhat misguided but interesting rework of the Mozilla menus. This may just motivate me to put together a rework that is closer to MPT’s menu specs. That the current context menu for images does not have Back is driving me crazy. I made some of the modifications prior to Mozilla 1.0 but then Mozilla/Browser came along and stole much of the thunder. Perhaps I should just work on the Mozilla/Browser project on Mozdev. It looks like they are working to improve the Preferences.

According to a July 19, 2002 press release, the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet will plan and build all new and reconstructed roadways with pedestrians and bicycles in mind:

Secretary of Transportation, James C. Codell, III recently signed the Pedestrian and Bicycle Travel Policy. This new policy will help guide the [Transportation] Cabinet’s evaluation of when, where, and how to include pedestrian and bicycle facilities as part of the overall transportation system. The policy guidelines give roadway planners and designers specific criteria for accommodating pedestrian and bicycle travel. Planners will bear in mind adjacent land use, existing pedestrian traffic, local bike plans, transit stops, and public input to determine the necessity for accommodating non-motorized travel.

This is great news for those that want to see additional facilities provided for bicycling, walking, running, and other non-motorized recreation. This type of planning combined with additional rail-trail development could help Kentucky build a nice interconnecting trail network.

Don Norman is working on a new book, “Emotion & Design” which will explore the roles that beauty and emotional impact play in the usability of designs. His site has a number of essays related to this topic, including Emotion & Design: Attractive things work better. One of the interesting points raised in the essay is that we use our emotions to make good/bad or safe/dangerous evaluations of the world, while we use cognition to interpret and make sense of the world. In stressful situations, the emotional aspect of the design can improve its usability. In short, “Attractive things work better.”

Given the horrible usability of many products, it is easy and understandable for design professionals to be stuck on the basic plain-and-simple functionality and ignore the beauty aspect. Norman emphasizes that the usability is still important–this is not just about prettiness:

There are many designers, many design schools, who cannot distinguish prettiness from usefulness…. True beauty in a product has to be more than skin deep, more than a façade. To be truly beautiful, wondrous, and pleasurable, the product has to fulfill a useful function, work well, and be usable and understandable.

May we have more products that are beautiful to look at and pleasurable to use.

The Holy Synod of Bishops of the Orthodox Church in America have elected His Eminence, Archbishop Herman of Philadelphia and Eastern Pennsylvania as the new Metropolitan of the Orthodox Church in America. God grant him many years! Metropolitan Herman succeeds His Beatitude, Metropolitan Theodosius, who is retiring after 25 years of service due to health concerns.

Mozilla may soon have support for the Microsoft-inspired MARQUEE tag. Bug 156979, which is working on this support, is a microcosm of the problems with Mozilla development. We have claims that this will never be enabled by default, comments that we should have Standards über Alles, worry that Mozilla will be perceived as irrelevant, insightful UI comments, a fascinating (but incomplete) discussion about what criteria Mozilla should use for implementing and adding non-standard extensions, and recommendations to check it in now and broadly enable it despite several saying we shouldn’t. I am surprised that it has remained generally civil and relevant.

In comment 58, Brendan Eich fails to see how implementing this impacts usability. For those unfamiliar with the tag, marquee converts a text message into a scrolling string of letters that dance across the screen like the blinking lights in a theater marquee. If implemented as in IE, there’s likely to be no way to make it stop. Brendan’s argument seems to be that any tag or behavior added to the browser that occurs only in the web page content area does not affect usability or UI. Support for marquee seems to me to be a choice between usability and flashiness. I honestly question the assumptions of the bug: 1) that sites are currently broken without support for marquee and 2) that they should be evangelized to use standards-based means to achieve this scrolling behavior.

I’m curious what Matthew Thomas will have to say about this.

We have two gerbils, Point and Click. They are great fun to watch and play with. Yesterday my eldest was playing with them and Click escaped on a little adventure and roamed around the house. Sadly, the little one somehow injured herself and lost a part of her tail. The tip of a gerbil’s tail is designed so it will easily shed if caught by a predator. More sickening than the bloody bone left after the injury was that she chewed it off. She seems to be getting along fine now with her shorter tail. We’ll keep an eye on her. Point is comforting her, too.

It appears that Mozilla will soon have an incremental find feature that will find text on a web page as you type. You can download an initial version of this now or try the bookmarklets by Jesse Ruderman. I have mixed feelings about this. It sounds nice to be able to jump to links by typing a few letters from the link text, but seems like this has the potential to be really annoying. I seem to frequently get focus in the wrong window and start typing. Up until now this has been no problem in Mozilla. I wonder whether this will be a big usability win. It feels transparent, so perhaps it will be cool. Alan Cooper says, “A dialog box is another room. Have a good reason to go there.” And Jef Raskin has a similar suggestion for finding in a list.

Basil’s recent comments about nuclear waste disposal in Nevada makes me wonder whether he’s been thinking about free speech and blogging. Peggy Noonan has:

Let us hold high a single sparkler to honor those American institutions that, in this interesting year, did not flounder or fail…

Blogging. The 24-7 opinion sites that offer free speech at its straightest, truest, wildest, most uncensored, most thoughtful, most strange. Thousands of independent information entrepreneurs are informing, arguing, adding information. Imagine if we’d had them in 1776: “As I wrote in yesterday’s lead item on SamAdams.com, my well meaning cousin John continues his grammatical nitpicking with Jefferson (link requires registration) ‘Inalienable,’ ‘unalienable,’ whatever. Boys, let’s fight. Start the war.” Blogs may one hard day become clearinghouses for civil support and information when other lines, under new pressure, break down.

Howard Greenstein agrees with Noonan and expresses belief that blogs are a new (and potentially better informed) Press.

With the fix for bug 62495, Mozilla now has the best URL bar editing behavior of any browser. Single-click still selects the entire URL bar (unless you turn it off). Even better, selection works as expected. I find it hard to believe that Mozilla 1.0 shipped with very broken right-click context menu behavior (bug 96446) but that’s fixed now too. I’m glad to see these basic usability problems getting fixed. It’s about time. The URL bar has had broken behavior since 2000 or earlier.

It appears that the Chase Cringely project website that I mentioned earlier is finally up. It’s just a shame that nobody paid any attention to content or usable design. Because they’re using TWiki to run the site, it looks like they are more interested in a Buck Rogers character than in saving others like Chase. Why is it that most open source projects seem to be hostile to outside help even though that’s what they are trying to get?

I’m interested in the MonitorPad suggestion, particularly the idea that it could be combined with a regular baby monitor. As we have been thinking about getting a baby monitor, I can say that we’d definitely consider something like the MonitorPad.

I just noticed that the Daniel Boone Rails to Trails group has a website. It looks like they are in the beginning stages and don’t have much content available yet. I’m looking forward to seeing a map soon. It’s nice to see more rails-to-trails groups springing up in Kentucky.

Mozilla apparently took this saying to heart and decided to prevent it by never expiring history entries. Did you wonder where your disk space was going or why Mozilla seemed to load slower and slower? Now you know. Hopefully this will be fixed in 1.0.1.

People seem to find it mildly interesting that a balloonist has managed a solo flight around the world. Perhaps the fact that this is the balloonist’s sixth attempt makes it a bit less impressive.

The recent news about ballooning reminds me of a wonderful book called The Twenty-One Balloons. I first read this whimsical and inspiring tale as a child and it is still one of my all time favorites. The book, written and illustrated by William Pene du Bois, won the 1948 Newbery Medal. The story recounts an imaginative balloon adventure and describes many fanciful inventions which are beautifully illustrated in almost blueprint detail. The illustrations emphasize and expand the story, immersing you more deeply in it. When I think of a creative effort reaching perfection, I think of this book.

In a remarkable show of good sense, Mozilla added the “almost-standards mode” to support XHTML 1.0 Transitional, HTML 4.01 Transitional, and a bothersome IBM system doctype. (See bug 153032, the revised doctype sniffing documentation, and the evolt.org article about this.) For the first time, some of the IBM pages I use daily look perfect. And there was much rejoicing! Too bad this didn’t make 1.0, but 1.0.1 may be good enough.

When is a JavaScript console no longer a JavaScript console? When it becomes the “Error” console. David Baron finally “fixed” Bug 154942 and added a CSS warning message to the console. Having a warning message is helpful. At least now developers will have a clue about what’s wrong. It still feels broken to have quirks mode happily handle “incorrect” MIME types and simply adding a valid doctype will break the page. For the sake of compatibility, I’d think Mozilla should handle some commonly broken, but reasonable, MIME types, such as text/plain. There’s more discussion about this confusing issue in Bug 113399.

I’m gonna miss the JavaScript console if it gets renamed. It has been a good helper for many years. I think I’d rather see a page compliance console like in iCab and keep the JavaScript separate.