Year: 2002

It looks like Blake pulled his rather venomous August 29, 2002 blog entry about the Netscape 7 release. It’s a shame the blog is gone, I thought it was one of his better ones.

Mike Pinkerton apparently saw it too:

Jinglepants writes:

Are you paying attention now, you ignorant, stupid, incompetent buffoons?

Yeah, i pretty much agree. The management chain at Netscape deserves this one 110%. It was only a matter of time before CNet (who are also incompetent and obvsiouly didn’t even run the product they were reviewing) called us on the carpet and made us pay for our greed.

We told you so. We told you so. We told you so.

David Hyatt also rants about how Netscape managers refused to listen. It sounds like the same story.

Blake ranted about the decision to pull popup ad-blocking technology from Netscape 7. He characterized it as making Netscape look money-hungry and stupid. Reading between the lines, it sounds like many Mozilla developers pointed out that because it was in Mozilla, it would be more noticable when it was pulled, and therefore shouldn’t be removed.

Blake also rightly critiqued the competence of the review at CNet, saying that it was obvious that they never used the browser. He asked why the review compared Netscape 7 to Mozilla instead of more appropriately to IE 6.

Most interesting of all was his comment that it’s hard to feel good about the Netscape release when in 3 days of working on his Phoenix project (formerly mozilla/browser) he’d made a 50% improvement in speed and added a history sidebar as well. He was advocating that management get some people working on real improvements.

Hopefully he pulled his comments because he realized he was a bit heated and not because of management pressure. If anyone has a cache of the story, I’d love to look at it again.

Jon Udell: “What mainly fascinates me about this moment in history is the role of the blog. We’ve turned a corner, I think, in terms of pluralism. Authentic voices on all sides of all debates are heard directly. The world is profoundly more transparent. Given the irreducible and growing complexity of everything, this is a necessary and wonderful thing. I feel lucky to be a part of it!”

Idiotic bug comment of the day: “I for one will not use mozilla for browzing until the splash is changed, or more sensibly just deleted.” You’re not using a product because of the splash screen!? Just add -nosplash to the command line options and go on. First impressions matter, but there are thousands of problems more important than replacing the fire-breathing mozilla splash screen.

I recently discovered that Ray Ozzie is experimenting with blogging. In case you haven’t heard of him, he was the creator and developer of Lotus Notes. He founded Groove networks in 1997 to take groupware in a new, more secure, and decentralized direction. Because of his years of experience, he’s got terrific insights into how users behave in collaborative environments, particularly with regard to security.

He predicts: “If we continue on the current trajectory, e-mail will become the place where you receive stuff from people you don’t know, and Groove and other collaborative environments will be where you work with people you know.” This is already true for me. I already do a great deal of productive work interaction through instant messaging and IRC. E-mail has become a tool for archiving information, exchanging less-pressing thoughts, and spam.

The architecture of our collaborative environment matters a great deal in our productivity and the quality of the conversation, he says. Blogs improve the signal-to-noise ratio by creating distributed conversation threads that naturally omit the spammers and flamers because nobody links to them. If you have a blog, you can participate in the conversation. The conversation can be guided as blogs link between each other. Civilized public discourse can return: blogs allow everyone to have the power of their own press.

Speaking of blog architecture, a number of folks are working on the BlogMD Initiative. The name made me think of medical blogs, but in actuality they are talking about ways to improve the metadata (MD, you see) exposed about blogs. There are other similiar projects: BlogChalking wants bloggers to add geographic and demographic information to their blogs. They’re off to a good start with thousands of people adding blogchalk meta tags, but the data isn’t completely reliable due to formatting issues (Some people use a postal abbreviation, such as TX, instead of the full state name, Texas). BlogMD seems to be focused on data that is typically available on blog web pages, such as last update time and URL. Having a way to access this consistently and programmatically for all blogs would be helpful. And I’m sure there’s other metadata that would be useful.

I’ve got to run to vespers at church, but I also want to mention there is a privacy concern with some metadata, particularly the demographic data available when blogchalking. Many times we read stories in the newspaper and have no idea about the demographics of the author or editor. This hasn’t particularly harmed newspapers. How much metadata should be available?

Awesome. I read some groovy news about gecko feet and now this. Mozilla 1.1 is finally out. Go get it, use it, and spread the word. The Release Notes for 1.1 tell you what’s new. There are many improvements from 1.0.

Researchers at Lewis & Clark college have figured out how geckos can stick to anything. “Researchers found that the tips of the hairs on the bottom of gecko feet are tiny enough to take advantage of a weak attraction between individual molecules called van der Waals forces.” Because the adhesive technique is based on the structure of the hairs and not chemistry or capillary action, it has many possible applications in synthetic form. Imagine tape that works underwater or in a vacuum. Think of tape that doesn’t lose its stickiness and is self cleaning. I can’t wait for Band-Aids that don’t stick when you remove them. This is better than VELCRO.

Ian Hixie provided an insightful quiz to show that there’s more to writing proper markup than running it through a validator. The answers are educational and identify several common misconceptions about which tags are required and how tags should be used. Proper and accessible pages take work beyond what a validator can easily check.

I was happy to get 4 out of 4 in a minute. The errors seemed obvious to me, almost as bad as someone using the <a> tag just to create underlined headings. Based on the results, there’s a lot of educational work to be done to teach people how to create proper markup. The quiz also makes it obvious why automatic conversions from a non-markup format (such as Word .DOC or Adobe Acrobat .PDF) to a markup language generate such poor results.

After a week of silence, I’m wondering if Matthew Thomas has really given up. Perhaps he’s just having connectivity problems or taking a vacation. Come back soon, mpt!

In response to Asa and mpt’s conversation, Basil rants that user interaction != user interface. Basil makes a good point: broken pages cause usability problems, regardless of whether it is the web developer or browser that is at fault. Having some indicator in Mozilla that the page has problems seems reasonable, but I sort of agree with Asa that users will think it reflects their feelings and will do nothing to help them. I doubt most users even notice the little triangle warning on the status bar in IE that says there are script errors. Still, informing the user is better than not. Even Asa is arguing for more information for the user when he describes the problems with installing plugins.

Yay! The bugzilla search form has been updated to the new and much improved version. It’s about time! I wish they’d first fixed bug 155502 so that the search field was focused immediately as with every sane search engine in the world. Oh well, the old one didn’t give focus either.

The incremental find that I mentioned earlier has also been checked in. No UI yet, but you can add the accessibility.typeaheadfind pref to turn it on. Cool.