Roo’s Ramblings

I stumbled upon a blog the other day and was impressed with the category list that you often see on a side bar of the page. What I liked was how each item was in a box with rounded corners. It was all nicely designed and changed colour when you hovered, etc. I’ve done menus with rounded buttons before - I needed lots of images. But this site was not using images here, as I could select the text. Hmm… better look under the hood…

It turns out to be a pure CSS solution and a single line at that:

-moz-border-radius: 2px

Gasp! What is this?!? Mozilla specific CSS! Good grief. Haven’t we been here before guys? After all the scorn poured upon Microsoft for constantly ignoring standards, I was slighltly agog at how our champion of compliance had started to sneak in its own proprietary elements in to the fray.

Calm down

I fired off a query to Google quicker than you could say “hypocrite”. What I quickly discovered was, thankfully, not Mozilla pushing it’s own ideas of what CSS should be. My fears were quickly allayed, and frankly, I was feeling a bit sheepish for jumping to the incorrect conclusions instead of thinking things through a little further. If you had forgotten, like me, that Mozilla is much more than a browser: it’s an application platform. Mozilla uses its own XUL (XML User Interface Language) for defining interfaces. To get the interface to do anything, JavaScript is used. From this it is possible to produce cross-platform applications. And this is where these damn tags fit in. They were in fact intended for use within XUL-based interfaces.

Mozilla is not recommending they be used for public webpages for obvious reasons. If they are, then they are essentially being abused. I suppose in some situations you could risk it, even though they are essentially being abused. If you want to find out what else is available, here’s a list.

Postscript

It has just occurred to me that whilst using proprietary tags is a Bad Idea, there is an unusal analogy. Things like rounded corners on boxes will be coming in for CSS3 (which isn’t even complete yet). However, there have already been many advances in the CSS2 standard. However, what’s the point of something like CSS3 in the real world? The fact remains that the vast majority of users do not run a browser capable of implementing the standards (cheers, Microsoft). In many respects, using the lastest CSS standards, you are in fact using a niche feature set that many people can’t appreciate. Judging by my website logs, the vast majority of non-IE users are using a Mozilla-based product. Therefore, if you’re using CSS2, transparent PNGs, SVG, etc, then you could be forgiven for using Mozilla specific features.

It’s something that always bothers me: why are cars manufactured to go faster than the highest speed limits? Why am I even thinking about this, especially when it’s Christmas? Well, I was reading an old copy of PC Pro magazine and a journalist also made a similar remark about cars going fast in reference to the music industry’s successful hounding of p2p networks.

Sony won its landmark case decades ago that deferred responsibility from itself should anyone use video recorders for illegal activities. P2p networks ought to benefit from the same precedent, right? Well, no. Because they don’t have the same expensive lawyers to defend their interestes.

So, why hasn’t anyone sued a car manufacturer yet for deliberately making cars travel faster than the speed limit? Speeding can cause real harm to people, not just to the bottom-line.

So, I went to see March of the Penguins the other day. It’s an interesting little wildlife documentary - not the sort of thing you expect to see at the cinema, but welcome nonetheless. I would recommend it to others. But, man, does it tug on the heartstrings? It makes the Bambi look like a walk in the park. You’ll be needing to reach for the tissues more times than a Pamela Anderson home video.

The film charts the pretty amazing ritual of the Emperor Penguins’ breeding season - or, as Hollywood would say, it’s a “love story”. I won’t say any more other than because the location is antartica, it’s a tad chilly and that presents a few problems. Those crazy penguins…

Dang, it only took two years to contradict himself since his 2003 I ain’t #%&$ing dead yet. Richard Pryor was a genius - rather fucked up, but, hey, that’s rock and roll. Under ‘occupation’, he described himself as “Fucking legend”, and he wasn’t wrong.

Mr Pryor, RIP.

Jacman is one of my favourite projects. I had a lot of motivation to work on it when I conceived the idea. Plus, it seemed to get a good reception for its v0.1 release. However, development had pretty much ceased. This was largely due to my relocation and new job. Plus, Jon-Anders (Sonix) has a busy workload with his studies. That said, possibly the largest factor was because my motivation had faded due to underwhelming reviews.

You see, I wrote Jacman for others. I used to see many calls in the forums for GUI front-ends. I wasn’t bothered myself - I’m fine with the command line. Yet, it seemed like a cool project and I went for it. The problem is, any negative comments about Jacman is rarely about the program itself - but simply about my choice of language. Perhaps I should have known better than to use non-Free software on an otherwise Free platform. Oh, and of course, “Java is slow”. My point is that I can never seem to have a discussion about Jacman - it always goes off on a tangent about the language! Anyone who saw the Jacman thread on the forums this week will have witnessed this.

Anyway, I’ve decided not to let Jacman fade away. I’ve been dipping into the code most nights this week - just adding a few lines here and there. Hopefully the code for the next release will be stable by this time next week, after which I’ll send out a call for translators. For the releases after that, I’ve had some great ideas on how to make the user experience even better, but I’ll keep that to myself for now. Basically, my approach now is to avoid language debates and just let the program speak for itself. I still belive that of all the pacman front-ends in development, it’s functionally ahead, but I would say that, wouldn’t I?! Fortunately, Jon-Anders and I have plenty of ideas on where to take Jacman in the future to improve it in terms of functionality and usablility.