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about:mozilla - Paris workshop, Mobile Firefox design, Aurora, border-image, ECMAScript Harmony, and more…

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Mozilla add-ons workshop in Paris: Sept 20th
Paul Rouget posts, “The Mozilla Add-ons Workshop (MAOW) in Paris is now open for subscriptions! It will take place on Saturday, September 20th. Our objective is to bring together French-speaking XUL developers, hackers, Web developers to discuss Mozilla technologies.” More information about the MOAW is available (in French) at the Mozilla wiki MAOW page, and if you are going to attend you are asked to register at the XULfr.org workshop page. More information is available about the workshop in both English and French.

A glimpse into the Mobile Firefox design process
Aza Raskin writes, “Designing at Mozilla is an interesting process: We are committed to doing design in the open and involving community in a fundamental capacity, yet we must avoid design by committee. For the latest round of user experience iterations for Firefox Mobile, Madhava Enros and I are recording our discussion sessions. It’s an experiment, so I have a couple of questions: 1) is this a useful thing to do — do you find value in seeing our unfiltered face-to-face meetings, and 2) in what ways could we make it more valuable to you?” Aza and Madhava have posted two videos so far: Preferences, Add-ons, and Downloads in Fennec, and In-page Find in Fennec. They’re looking for feedback, so if you have anything to add, leave comments on the blog posts.

Mozilla Labs and Adaptive Path “Aurora” browser concept series
Mozilla Labs and Adaptive Path have created a browser concept video illustrating one vision of what technology, the browser, and the Web may look like in the future. Called “Aurora”, the concept video has been released in four parts — each dealing with a different browser-use scenario — and these are hosted on the Adaptive Path Aurora page. Also included on the site are articles about Aurora’s design themes and process as well as other reflections on Open Source design and the vision behind Aurora as a whole. Aurora was developed and released as part of the launch of Mozilla Lab’s browser concept series, an ongoing initiative to encourage designers and developers to share their visions of the future of the browser and the Web.

border-image in Firefox
John Resig has put together some demos for the new CSS 3 border-image implementation that is part of Firefox 3.1. “This is a new CSS 3 module that makes the exact slicing of images (and their positioning around an element) quite easy. The most obvious use case for them exists in constructing beautiful scalable buttons.” You will need a nightly release of Firefox in order for John’s demos to work. He also includes code samples and extensive explanations for the demos.

ECMAScript Harmony: JavaScript evolution in action
Recent events related to ECMAScript — the specification that guides the development of JavaScript — have generated an unusual amount of buzz and press coverage. The crux of the matter is this: the ECMAScript 4 specification has been under development for quite some time. Those involved (primarily from Adobe, Mozilla, Opera, and Google) agreed upon a set of features they thought should be implemented and created a specification around that framework.

Other people (primarily from Microsoft and Yahoo) disagreed with how much of the ES4 specification should actually be implemented. Within the framework of the ECMAScript 3.1 activity, they advocated select changes to ECMAScript 3, and were averse to some of the syntax changes in ES4. Almost inevitably, this split lead to a situation where the ECMAScript 3.1 group wanted to add changes that would impact the development of ECMAScript 4, resulting in a clash between the groups that has stretched out over the past year.

Discussion between these two groups finally came to an amicable conclusion earlier this month at the July 2008 Oslo meeting, however, resulting in a cooperative refocusing on simplicity and pragmatic language additions. This collective effort will work to improve the existing ECMAScript 3.1 specification while, simultaneously, working on a new successor specification with the moniker “ECMAScript Harmony” that will include more significant language additions.

These developments have been covered extensively by other bloggers and podcasters, where you can get the full story: John Resig on ECMAScript Harmony, Arun Ranganathan’s Thoughts on Harmony and Evolution, and the Open Web Podcast on ECMAScript Harmony.

Developer calendar
For an up-to-date list of the coming week’s Mozilla project meetings and events, please see the Mozilla Community Calendar wiki page.

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Original Article from Mozilla

Filed under Mozilla

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