Categories
Mozilla Security

Reporter, the next generation

Now that I’ve basically stabilized the new reporter tool for the branch, I’ve been planning for what will come in the next version. Quite a few neat little enhancements, some small, some larger.

Client Side

  • Screenshots – you will be able to attach a screenshot when sending a report. The option will be disabled by default (likely a button or a checkbox on send) to prevent submitting screenshots of things you shouldn’t for security reasons, you can send when you want.
  • Remember Email Address – I’ve been debating if this is necessary. It would just remember your email address for you so you don’t have to type it in again and again.

Server Side

  • Adjustable Columns – you can choose what columns to show in the results page, making it much more useful to analyze. [Done]
  • Reporter Proxy – this will give the ability for a company to host it’s own reporter server, capture reports within their intranet, and forward the rest to the mozilla reporter server. Perfect for companies who want to improve the Firefox experience on their intranet. [Work In Progress]
  • Screenshots – see above, this is pretty much the same thing.
  • Mark Invalid – some reports are on occasion totally bogus. We don’t need them in the database. We’ll have an option to report bogus reports, and an admin can confirm and get rid of them. This will keep everything as accurate as possible.
  • Bugs for Host – we’ll have the ability to view related bugzilla bugs on a particular host.
  • Reporter Toys – yea, I’ve been tinkering. I won’t say what this exactly is, but it’s a variety of extra code and stuff that could be fun to play with.
  • Templating – on the technical side, were moving to templates so the HTML is separate. Much easier to manage from a programming point of view. [Done]
  • Bug Fixes – during the above templating, a bunch of bug fixes and other small changes. [Done]
  • Stats – some statistics are always fun to have. Basic right now, we may expand as time and ideas become available. [Done]
  • CSS Design Love – reporter’s webtool is rather pathetic visually. I’m the first to admit it. I’d love an improved stylesheet. Something that makes reporter look cleaner, and more professional.

Roadmap

Some of the server stuff already landed. Some is in the works (in particular proxy). I’m not promising any particular feature in any timeframe at this point. Some of the above may be bumped to another milestone, or scratched all together. If you have any ideas, or feel like contributing, feel free. I’d love to get some good CSS, or perhaps some patches for reporter.

That basically serves as the roadmap/status update of where the tool is right now. We’ve got some great feedback, and close to 5000 reports already (and were only at alpha 2 in the release cycle).

Categories
Programming Web Development

Zen of CSS Design

Zen of CSS Design is out. I think I’ve got to pickup a copy of that book. For now just added to the wishlist. Looks rather good. David Shea is rather brilliant. I’m curious if anyone has seen it yet (and what they think of it).

Categories
Blog MacVillage.net

Static Building

I’ve started building static pages with WordPress, to see if I can speed things up (even more). I started experimenting with it a week or so ago, and have been toying around. At this point I think it’s pretty good, minus a few small glitches (all I can live with for the moment).

One apparently is that in WordPress 1.3, it doesn’t correctly show how long it took to process. For example I see:

Dynamic Page Served (once) in 0.182 seconds
Static Page Served in 1,105,325,889.680 seconds

No, it didn’t take that long. It actually loaded quicker than the dynamic page.

But yes, I’m feeling even better about WordPress, it’s a solid platform to run a Blog on. Easy to setup, configure, install, tweak, skin. I love 1.5, but I won’t be moving over until it hits final.

I’ve been somewhat quiet these past few days, since I’ve been spending a ton of time coding away on various projects. It’s starting to get close to some of it being put into production. Though some larger projects are far from completion. Other than that, not much else to say.

Categories
Web Development

Why Does CSS have to suck

[rant]
I’m going out on an edge here to say this, knowing a few people will bite my head off for even suggesting this. But I must ask: Why does CSS have to suck? At what point did the CSS WG come up with that decision? Ok, now let me explain where this is coming from:

I’m a strong believer in web standards. They are a great idea, and using CSS is right, and I do support that. What I don’t support is what CSS actually is like.

CSS has been around for some time, but why wasn’t there CSS Columns for example since the beginning? A very basic part of most page designs. CSS is extremely awkward when it comes to layout. Text manipulation is easy. It’s layout that’s painful. Then of course add in browser support.

I think this may be a tiny little reason why web standards aren’t prevalent on the net as of yet. Because CSS has a steep learning curve.

I’m going to really take a chance when I say this: But perhaps CSS3 should rework it from the ground up? Focus on layout and actually make things easier?

Look how easy I can design a site with tables. I can position fairly well, align stuff, etc. etc. Now try with CSS.

I’m working on a project right now that I’m trying to adhere to web standards. But what’s my problem? I’m spending way to much time on layout, and not enough time on the backend. That’s really not good. If anything, designing should become easier.

Most corporate websites are designed by designers, not web developers. Web Developers get handed a page, and integrate it into the CMS. Now how many designers do you think are ever going to sit down and do CSS? Their mind is in design, not code.

Again, I agree CSS is a great theory, keep design and content separate. But the CSS implementation just plain sucks. And until it improves, I can’t see penetration being very high.

Especially after languages like HTML being so easy, you’d think they’d have the perfect complement with CSS.

CSS layout is just wrong. It’s awkward, tough, and not friendly.

[/rant]

Categories
Web Development

XHTML FAQ

A grreat FAQ on XHTML is available, and I encourage all fellow web developers to read up. I found a few interesting things:

First read this:

strong>Why is it allowed to send XHTML 1.0 documents as text/html?

XHTML is an XML format; this means that strictly speaking it should be sent with an XML-related media type (application/xhtml+XML, application/xml, or text/xml). However XHTML 1.0 was carefully designed so that with care it would also work on legacy HTML user agents as well. If you follow some simple guidelines, you can get many XHTML 1.0 documents to work in legacy browsers. However, legacy browsers only understand the media type text/html, so you have to use that media type if you send XHTML 1.0 documents to them. But be well aware, sending XHTML documents to browsers as text/html means that those browsers see the documents as HTML documents, not XHTML documents.

Then read this:

Why is it disallowed to send XHTML 1.1 documents as text/html?

XHTML 1.1 is pure XML, and only intended to be XML. It cannot reliably be sent to legacy browsers. Therefore XHTML 1.1 documents must be sent with an XML-related media type, such as application/xhtml+XML.

Now in the source of that webpage, I see:

< ?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
< !DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
      "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<HTML xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
</html>

but Mozilla says:

Type:  text/html

Does anyone taste dogfood? Will the net ever move to towards XML? Not even the W3C feels it’s safe to move.

I don’t think we will ever see websites that say:

Type:  application/xhtml+XML

On a sidenote: Does anyone know what versions of Internet Explorer support this trick? Is it 5.0+? Or just 6.0?

Categories
Web Development

PHP 5.0 is Released!

The PHP development team is proud to announce the official release of PHP 5.

Some of the key features of PHP 5 include:

  • The Zend Engine II with a new object model and dozens of new features.
  • XML support has been completely redone in PHP 5, all extensions are now focused around the excellent libxml2 library (http://www.xmlsoft.org/).
  • A new SimpleXML extension for easily accessing and manipulating XML as PHP objects. It can also interface with the DOM extension and vice-versa.
  • A brand new built-in SOAP extension for interoperability with Web Services.
  • A new MySQL extension named MySQLi for developers using MySQL 4.1 and later. This new extension includes an object-oriented interface in addition to a traditional interface; as well as support for many of MySQL’s new features, such as prepared statements.
  • SQLite has been bundled with PHP. For more information on SQLite, please visit their website (http://www.sqlite.org/).
  • Streams have been greatly improved, including the ability to access low-level socket operations on streams.
  • And lots more…

Enjoy!
PHP Development Team

Sweet, I’ll have to update Bender this weekend so I can toy around with it.

Categories
Blog

In the spirit of changes

In the spirit of changes, I did take about an hour today and update some of my older blog posts. They are now formatted much better, such as putting quotes in blockquotes (rather than another color, or italics), and separating code from the content.

Lots of little stuff like that, but it makes the site much nicer.

Categories
Programming

Robert’s Book Club: PHP Books

Well what PHP books do you recommend for someone who wants to enhance already pretty solid understanding of the language? I’ve got a rather good level of experience, but want some reference, and good tips on getting better (there’s always room to improve).

MySQL, Second Edition

Programming PHP

PHP Cookbook

Web Database Applications with PHP & MySQL

Advanced PHP Programming

I can’t decide, they all look pretty interesting. Anyone read any of these? Good? Bad? Recommend another?

This ain’t no Opera’s Book Club. 😉

Categories
Programming

vLIB rules

If your a PHP developer, and you don’t know about it yet, check out vLIB. I’ve worked quite a bit with templating for a few years now. I think this is the best library for implementing templates in a PHP application I’ve seen. It’s got a good amount of flexibility, and it’s easy to implement. Not to mention is’s nice and fast.

I’ve written several very crummy templating systems for my own stuff over the years. And they stink compared to this. Honestly. I’ve decided to throw them out and port over to vLIB.

I hate PHP Apps with HTML all over. Eventually they are doomed to become impossible to maintain. At least with templating, it’s easy.

Categories
Programming

A day in the code

Well, I did get stuff done today. Some project aquarius work (all HTML I might add, as much as “love” it). Tomorrow I think I can finish this front end stuff and get back to my beloved backend.

Also nearing the end of bug 217149. I think this last edit should do it.

Also many thanks to those who sent me an email/comment over yesterday’s post on securita. It will be a few days before I can give this some attention again, but I am slowly working towards something.