This is my report on activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending May 23, 2008.

Projects for the week

Here’s a summary of what Foundation-related activities went on last week; for more information about others’ activities please see the weekly status reports published by David Boswell, Gerv Markham, and Zak Greant.

  • Grants and related expenditures
    • Eitan Isaacson completed his Mozilla Foundation-funded work to improve the Orca open source screen reader for Linux. Thanks go to Eitan for all his work on this!
    • The Mozilla Foundation is funding Ben Millard for an accessibility-related project to study how authors use HTML in practice, compare this with the semantics and accessibilty-related features in HTML5, identify any gaps, and help develop realistic ways to fill them.
    • The Mozilla Foundation is funding Wellington Fernando de Macedo to help implement in the Mozilla code base server-sent DOM events functionality as specified in HTML5. This is a project originally proposed for the Google Summer of Code; we thought it was a project worth supporting but didn’t have enough SoC slots to include it as part of that program.
  • CAs and related issues
    • As I previously announced in the m.d.t.crypto newsgroup, Kathleen Wilson will be assisting me with the task of gathering information about Certificate Authorities that apply for inclusion of their root certificates into Mozilla. I’ve assigned a number of CA-related bugs to Kathleen, with a priority on getting EV-related requests processed.
    • I updated the pending and included lists to reflect changes in Firefox 3 RC1.
  • Conferences
    • Zak prepared for his keynote at eLiberatica and for the FOSSCoach event at OSCON.

Upcoming events and activities

Schorsch (Schorsch@invalid.com) - 2008-05-29 06:57

Well - it looks as if the T-Systems CA ( https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=378882 ) pass this train? I’ve to wait until FF4.7, am I right?

hecker - 2008-05-29 12:25

We are currently looking at the T-Systems application; there’s a chance it and others may be approved in time for Firefox 3.0.1.

Ben ‘Cerbera’ Millard - 2008-05-30 01:04

Hi Frank, I’m the Ben Millard in the second bullet from the “Grants and related expenditures” list. I’ve blogged about my grant being approved by you: http://projectcerbera.com/blog/2008/05#day29 For anyone interested, my grant proposal is online here: http://projectcerbera.com/web/study/html5-research (Preview would be nice. Is HTML allowed? I assumed it wasn’t.)

hecker - 2008-05-30 03:21

Ben, WordPress has always seemed to me a bit lacking with respect to its comment facility. I’m hosting this blog on wordpress.com, and looking at the admin interface I can’t see any way to enable preview or HTML.

jwalden - 2008-05-31 16:04

There was some previous work on server-sent events in bug 338583, in case you weren’t aware of it. Definitely pretty abandoned at this point, but it may still be useful as a starting point.

hecker - 2008-06-02 15:22

jwalden: An explicit goal of the proposal is to build on the work in bug 338583.