Mozilla

This is my report on activities of the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending June 23, 2006. Projects for the week Here’s a partial listing of what I and others at the Foundation did this past week: Feed icon. I got some more comments on the usage guidelines. Next action(s): Review all the comments I can find and publish a new version of the guidelines. Accessibility grants. Håkan Waara formally started work on the follow-on project to implement OS X accessibility changes. Next action(s): Get the other accessibility grant under way. Calendar. I had a phone conversation with Dan Mosedale to discuss the Toronto calendar developers meeting and general calendar issues. Next action(s): Follow up on calendar-related issues as appropriate. Certification Authorities. I worked on CA applications from Firmaprofesional, Swisscom, and the Korean Information Security Agency (KISA). Next action(s): Get final information on Firmaprofesional and move to approve it. Get answers to remaining questions on Swisscom and KISA. Continue processing applications from more CAs waiting in the queue. Other. Gerv Markham returned and took back responsibility for responding to licensing-related requests (thanks Gerv! ). I had to cancel my planned trip to OSCON for family reasons. ...

UPDATE 2023-03-29: The piece below was originally written in 2006, and has been cited by Dave Herman of Mozilla Research as an influence on Rust community governance. I’ve fixed dead links where possible. This article is an outgrowth of my personal experiences as a participant in the Mozilla project working to create policies for the project that are both reasonable in terms of addressing the presumed problem at hand and acceptable to the various people who have a perceived stake in how the problem is addressed. In the course of doing that I evolved my own personal approach to approaching the problem of creating policies in an environment where people might disagree deeply about what such policies should be. ...

This is my report on activities of the Mozilla Foundation for the weeks ending May 26, June 2, June 9, and June 16, 2006. I should be back on my regular weekly update schedule next week. Projects for the week Here’s a partial listing of what I and others at the Foundation did the past few weeks: Feed icon. I published multiple blog posts on the topic of the feed icon (aka RSS icon), including draft usage guidelines and an accompanying FAQ. I also initiated the process of abandoning the previously-submitted trademark registration application for the icon. Next action(s): Publish final usage guidelines and FAQ, clean up any other loose ends. Accessibility grants. Håkan Waara completed work on the OS X accessibility implementation plan (including creation of a new wiki page discussing Mozilla accessibility for Mac OS X, and submitted a new proposal for actual implementation of the recommended changes. That proposal was approved, and Håkan has started work on it. I’m still working on getting another accessibility-related grant started. Finally, I did a blog post outlining an overall motivation and vision for Foundation support of Mozilla-related accessibility work. Next action(s): Get the other accessibility grant under way. Calendar. The Foundation is sponsoring two volunteer contributors (Michiel van Leeuwen and Matt Willis) to attend a meeting in Toronto to discuss calendar-related issues with Dan Mosedale and other developers working on Mozilla-based calendar software. Next action(s): Follow up on other calendar-related issues as appropriate. Other grants. I discussed with Chris Hofmann the possibility of having the Foundation fund some Mozilla-related projects that didn’t make the cutoff for Google’s Summer of Code. I also worked with Olivia Ryan of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University to nail down final arrangements between GMU and the Foundation relating to the Mozilla Digital Memory Bank. Next action(s): Work with Chris to identify suitable projects and find mentors for them. Clean up any loose ends with CHNM. Certification Authorities. I evaluated and approved GRCA to have its root CA certificate included in Mozilla-based products (see bug 274106). GRCA is the root CA for a Public Key Infrastructure operated by the government of Taiwan; among other things, it issues personal certificates to Taiwanese citizens. Next action(s): Work on more pending applications from CAs and try to clear the backlog. NetSquared conference. I attended the NetSquared conference in San Jose on May 30–31. The main focus of the conference was the intersection of nonprofit organizations and technology, and it was a good opportunity to connect with folks at other nonprofits whose issues and activities might intersect with ours. Next action(s): Do a blog post on the conference if/when I have time. mozillafoundation.org. Zak Greant continued work on putting together a prototype for a standalone mozillafoundation.org web site. Next action(s): Get design issues sorted out for the site, as well as issues with updating it. Create more content for site (adapting existing stuff on mozilla.org and elsewhere). Security presentation. Did an informal presentation to a government panel on the general topic of how open source projects, and in particular the Mozilla project, take measures to prevent, detect, and respond to security vulnerabilities and related problems. Next action(s): I may do a blog post on this general topic, time permitting. Administrivia. Gerv Markham had surgery; he’s now out of hospital and back working on Mozilla stuff. Next action(s): None at this time. ...

I got behind in doing the weekly Mozilla Foundation activity reports (for which I apologize); see the report for the week ending June 16, 2006 for activities during this week and the others I skipped.

I got behind in doing the weekly Mozilla Foundation activity reports (for which I apologize); see the report for the week ending June 16, 2006 for activities during this week and the others I skipped.

I got behind in doing the weekly Mozilla Foundation activity reports (for which I apologize); see the report for the week ending June 16, 2006 for activities during this week and the others I skipped.

Now that I’ve posted the feed icon usage guidelines and the accompanying FAQ and gotten some comments on the guidelines and other feed icon issues, I wanted to do a follow-up post. Here it is. First, there have been at least three substantive changes proposed to the guidelines: Lower the minimum allowable size of the icon to 12x12 pixels, in order to better match the fonts sizes used on many web sites. I think this is a reasonable change, but I’d like to hear from at least a few more people, especially anyone who disagrees. If I don’t see any disagreement in the next couple of days then I’ll go ahead and update the guidelines to make this change. Explicitly allow icon colors other than orange (e.g., blue and green). This is a harder question. To crib from a comment I made in response to this suggestion, there may be two different answers for two different groups. The first group is comprised mainly of people supplying feed-enabled applications (e.g., news aggregators, whether stand-alone or integrated into other apps) or operating equivalent online services (e.g., web-based aggregators). For these types of applications I think it’s more important to have a standard color, to help orient new users. For other people, including the vast majority of people running web sites (especially blogs and related personal sites), from the point of view of the guidelines it’s arguably less important to maintain a standard color. However, it’s not clear to me what the best way is to actually implement such flexibility in practice. We could change the actual guidelines to allow more colors, but that might imply that we think it’s OK to use different colors in all cases, which is not necessarily the case. The other possibility is just to leave the guidelines as is, but informally acknowledge that in practice web sites can and will ignore the guidelines in this area, and no one’s going to try to stop them. I’m not decided either way on this question, and would welcome further comments. Allow the use of drop shadows in contexts where they are used with icons as a standard part of the user interface. (This is mainly applicable to applications.) As with the point about the minimum size of the icon, I think this is a reasonable suggestion; however as in that case I’d like to get some more comments. I’d also prefer to not just drop the prohibition on drop shadows, but rather to modify that prohibition to acknowledge the context of use and allow some flexibility. ...

Mitchell Baker recently posted two articles about the use of the “feed icon”) (also known as the “RSS icon”), originally created for use with Firefox, and how best to promote universal use of the icon for use with RSS, Atom and other open web syndication formats. In this post I discuss how the Mozilla Foundation proposes to approach this issue. However first I want to personally apologize for any confusion and miscommunication around the issue of the feed icon and our proposals for promoting its use, as well as the delays in getting this issue dealt with. (I had meant to post on this topic earlier this week but family medical issues kept me occupied and offline.) I pledge to do what I can to get things back on track and get this issue resolved to everyone’s satisfaction. ...

I previously blogged about the Mozilla Foundation and the CSUN conference on information technology and persons with disabilities. As noted in the post the Mozilla project and Firefox are really gaining traction with people concerned about web accessibility, thanks to the hard work of people like Aaron Leventhal. Inspired by Aaron’s recent interview in the online publication Voice of the Nation’s Blind, I want to take a broader view and present my thoughts on why accessibility is important for the Mozilla project, the role that Mozilla and Firefox might play in the world of assistive technology (AT) as it evolves, and what the Mozilla Foundation might do to help this process along. ...

This is my report on activities of the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending May 19, 2006. Projects for the week Here’s a partial listing of what I and others at the Foundation did the week ending May 19: XTech. Gerv Markham attended the XTech conference in Amsterdam and did a blog post about his experiences. Gerv’s comments about the nature and purpose of XTech sparked a public discussion to which I contributed a comment. (Basically my point was that I’m happy with XTech as far as the Foundation is concerned; however I also see the possible usefulness of having a separate meeting focused solely on Mozilla stuff.) See also Daniel Glazman’s post responding to Gerv and Robert O’Callahan, as well as Mike Beltzner’s report on the conference itself and Tristan Nitot’s XTech wrap-up. Next action(s): I’m going to discuss with the Mozilla Corporation plans for future conferences, including proposals to have a European meeting targeted specifically to Mozilla contributors. Accessibility grants. Work related to the previous grants for OS X and XForms accessibility is proceeding apace. Next action(s): I’m still trying to get another accessibility grant under way. CA certificates and Mozilla. I approved the application from StartCom to have its root CA certificate included in Mozilla-based products (bug 289077). Next action(s): Start working on other pending CA applications. Administrivia. I took a day of vacation. Next action(s): None at this time. ...