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KaiRo's weBlog
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31. Dezember 2007
Weekly Status Report, W52/2007
I kept my computer off most of the Christmas holidays, but here's a short summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related things I could still work on in week 52/2007 (December 24 - 30):
This, of course, is the last of my reports for this year, but as with the code set free almost 10 years ago by the now-dead Netscape, the saga continues for SeaMonkey as well. In 2008, we hope to see our toolkit-based 2.0 release coming into shape and aim to go stronger than ever before.
I wish you all out there a happy and successful year of 2008!
- SeaMonkey Project Organization:
Didn't come around to write an announcement text for the Council reorganization or SeaMonkey 2 Alpha criteria blog post, both are high on the TODO list for next week/year.
- Tinderbox:
The missing SeaMonkey Mac OS X tinderbox has been re-setup with a new system and reinstalled and works fine again now. - Source L10n:
On December 24th, the day where we actually have our Christmas celebration in the evening, I could add four language to ChatZilla localization (Czech, French, Russian and Slovak).
The defines.inc files there showed up a bug in the "python preprocessor", which should be fixed soon. - German L10n:
Fixed a small error I introduced in error pages, but there wasn't much else to do this week. - Various Discussions:
Sidebar lists, death of Netscape, etc.
This, of course, is the last of my reports for this year, but as with the code set free almost 10 years ago by the now-dead Netscape, the saga continues for SeaMonkey as well. In 2008, we hope to see our toolkit-based 2.0 release coming into shape and aim to go stronger than ever before.
I wish you all out there a happy and successful year of 2008!
Von KaiRo, um 19:18 | Tags: L10n, Mozilla, SeaMonkey, Status | keine Kommentare | TrackBack: 1
Web Discrimination Or Browser Racism?
I have previously blogged about sucky UA strings or dynamic spoofing as a possible solution for this, even set out a large bug bounty for creating a mechanism that does just that. But those things only fight the symptoms of an underlying problem: discrimination against certain or unknown browsers on the web.
In earlier times, the now-dead Netscape tried to preach to web developers for granting basic access to their sites to all browsers in an effort called "Tech Evangelism". I think this terminology is too weak for such an effort though. This is not about preaching a better belief about some obscure tech stuff. The problem here is that people are closed out from using certain web sites just by their mere "look", by the identification their web client is sending to the site, and therefore by the "race" of their browser.
The cases listed as dependencies in our tracking bug are only the tip of the iceberg - and all those things are not minor technical difficulties, they are severe cases of discrimination against "weaker", less popular or simply unknown Internet clients. This tactic doesn't only interfere with principle 2 of the Mozilla Manifesto by not keeping the Internet open and accessible, it even violates the common sense behind human rights, by closing out people from those web services just by their appearance/identification.
Therefore, I encourage everyone in our community to use the terms web discrimination or even browser racism when talking about those barriers placed in our way by web developers.
It would be a nice idea to even set up a Firefox extension that alerts users when they are accessing a site that uses such discrimination tactics, powered by a list dynamically maintained by a good community of users, on some collaborative website that also explains the problem and points out better tactics and guidelines for web developers to follow, as well as access points for community members to inform the developers and maintainers of the respective websites about their discriminative/racist approach.
In earlier times, the now-dead Netscape tried to preach to web developers for granting basic access to their sites to all browsers in an effort called "Tech Evangelism". I think this terminology is too weak for such an effort though. This is not about preaching a better belief about some obscure tech stuff. The problem here is that people are closed out from using certain web sites just by their mere "look", by the identification their web client is sending to the site, and therefore by the "race" of their browser.
The cases listed as dependencies in our tracking bug are only the tip of the iceberg - and all those things are not minor technical difficulties, they are severe cases of discrimination against "weaker", less popular or simply unknown Internet clients. This tactic doesn't only interfere with principle 2 of the Mozilla Manifesto by not keeping the Internet open and accessible, it even violates the common sense behind human rights, by closing out people from those web services just by their appearance/identification.
Therefore, I encourage everyone in our community to use the terms web discrimination or even browser racism when talking about those barriers placed in our way by web developers.
It would be a nice idea to even set up a Firefox extension that alerts users when they are accessing a site that uses such discrimination tactics, powered by a list dynamically maintained by a good community of users, on some collaborative website that also explains the problem and points out better tactics and guidelines for web developers to follow, as well as access points for community members to inform the developers and maintainers of the respective websites about their discriminative/racist approach.
Von KaiRo, um 16:31 | Tags: Mozilla, SeaMonkey, UA String | 4 Kommentare | TrackBack: 1
