When we focus on what we want the world to look like, and make products that reflect that, we excel.

An important video from Jesse B. Dylan.

One Cloud? by liberato

This really wonderful post by Anil Dash echos a lot of what I’ve been talking about in the context of the larger web. I had a discussion with Ben Galbraith recently about this topic during a Mozilla lunch. He and I took (intentionally) different positions on topics to see what kind of discussion we could stimulate around how developers see the web platform.

Ben has some concern that the web platform isn’t as coherent as those that you find from the other big players – the iPhone platform, Silverlight, Java or any of the other giant siloed stacks. (Actually Ben was more interested in the capabilities of those platforms vs. the web, but I’ll talk about that later.) I’m basically of the opinion that the web that we have, and as messy as it seems, actually produces pretty good results. That the incrementalism and experimentation that we’ve seen from web browser vendors results in what I call “developer-friendly incompatibility.” That those changes are eventually codified to standards and taken mainstream because they degrade well and we can learn as we go. (Kind of like life!)

But it does raise an interesting question – what capabilities do we need to have for the web that are found in these stacks? And can they be applied in an incremental fashion? We’re starting to see that with video being promoted as a first class citizen with Flash as a trailing edge fallback. We’re starting to see the web pick up 3D capabilities with participation from Google, Apple and Mozilla. And we have the pretty wonderful library model that has produced jQuery, jQuery UI, mootools, YUI, dojo and many others – all of which come from pushing complexity to the edges of the web community.

But is it enough? Discuss. What’s missing, and what’s interesting? I would particularly love to hear from Java and Silverlight developers. What do you really love about those platforms? Is source-as-delivery and incrementalism enough?

• What is it about? It’s an event for people passionate about the open web. Each event includes discussion, hands-on-demos and collaborative scheming about ways to promote and protect the open participatory nature of the internet. It’s not just about Mozilla. It’s about making the web more open. More details on the agenda.
• Who should attend and participate? Local Mozillians, bloggers, designers, hackers, creative commonors and other open web aficionados
• Where? SURFnet
• When? Friday 6 March, 2009 from 10:00 to 17:00
• Want to know more? Please visit the MozCamp Utrecht Wiki page
• Interested? Please register.

So if you’re interested in coming out for it then sign up!

Update on February 24th, 2009: Due to popular demand I’ve made a screencast of the two demos that I used in this presentation.

I’ve put up slides from my talk at SCALE 2009.  Lots of people were interested in the slides.  There’s the .pdf I’ve linked to above and the original .odp format.  It covers most of the interesting new technical features that we’re going to include in Firefox 3.1.

Here are two relevant links from the talk:

• Firefox 3.1 for Developers
  
• The web-tech blog for technical updates to Mozilla and Firefox

Enjoy!

Evangelism Work Week Kickoff

This week the Evangelism team are all in Mountain View to connect and plan for 2009.  A crazy bunch of people who care about a lot of different things – add-ons, documentation, community development and the open web.

One of the more important things we’ll be doing this week is working on making it easier for people to get involved with the evangelism team.  I’ll post more at the end of the week, but you can also watch the Evangelism page in the wiki – we’ll start putting updates there.

Paul has been extremely active in the Mozilla community in Europe, particularly in France.  Those of you who who have been to events in Europe probably know him.  He has an incredible depth of knowledge about XUL and a lot of the rest of the Mozilla platform and has spent quite a bit of time hacking on Thunderbird.

But what really sets Paul apart from others is his passion for Mozilla and his willingness to organize people around it.  We’ve had some excellent people in Europe who have Evangelism in their blood, most notably Tristan, but Paul enjoys that special mix of technical skill, community organization and passion for the project that we love to have on our team.  It’s going to be great to have him as part of the Mozilla community full time.

As a first task I’ve asked him to help us put together technical information for people transitioning add-ons to Firefox 3.1.

You can follow Paul’s weblog or you can email him at prouget remove me at mozilla.com.

Welcome, Paul!