You've no doubt seen Justin Jackson's excellent web site, Words. I loved it before I was half-way finished reading the whole way through. The idea is powerful. Words are powerful. The web is powerful. A few days later I saw Roman Schmitz riffing on the same idea with words.txt.…
This week I spent a few days meeting with the Mozilla Foundation's Webmaker engineering and design team in the Toronto office. It was a great time of reflection after the past 9 weeks, and a time to plan the next 9 weeks. I left feeling like we're on track, and…
Last week I was in Toronto for the Mozilla Foundation All Hands, and one of the topics that came up was localization. With Webmaker, Mozilla is trying to move into new communities on the web, and engage with makers on a global scale. Global obviously means more than English, and…
I'm working across a lot of different repos these days, and while fixing a whitespace issue in one of my patches, I wondered if it would be possible to eliminate this altogether. Working with git, we already have a version of what I want in terms of [core.autocrlf](https:…
I've been thinking quite a bit lately about how Webmaker can take advantage of the work being done on Web Components and Custom Elements. I tasked Pomax with doing some research and prototyping, and the results have been encouraging. I wanted to say something about my current thinking and what…
I wrote previously about our work to add Media Clips to Popcorn Maker. Since then we've watched as people have started to make things with it, from Ron Swanson dancing to any song to the International Space Station orbiting Earth, which has been a lot of fun. One project Brett…
Though he does little to develop it, one of the enduring images for me of William Gibson's novel, Pattern Recognition, is his idea of jet lag, and the disconnecting of the body and soul, how the speed of modern travel unravels us. He writes: She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the…
HTML5 includes some great additions for authors wanting to work with microformats and microdata in markup. Last week I finished implementing the new <time> and <data> elements in Firefox (see bugs 629801 and 839371). You can already use them in Nightly, and…
One of the most requested new features we get for Mozilla Webmaker is web media sequencing. Users want to be able to use multiple video or audio clips in a single experience. This past week Scott and Kate, with help from Matt and Chris, have been building and testing a…
One of the discussions happening right now in the Mozilla Foundation software team is whether mandatory code reviews are a good thing. I've had versions of this conversation a number of times in the past few months, and today I'm going to write my thoughts down so I can point…