The Mozilla 1.0 Definition

The Evil Beaver writes: "Here we go. Mozillazine is reporting that Brenden Eich, mozilla.org's Technical Bigshot, has released the criteria to what is to be the 1.0 milestone. The 'manifesto' also explains why 1.0 is so important to reach, and why it isn't just another milestone, either. The Mozillazine article is here and the definition document here.

Comments

Re:mozillazine ?!?!?!?

[Chainsaw]

No, that's Mozillaquest.

It's a platform, so 1.0 is essential

[Khazunga]

Mozilla is more than a browser. It's a development platform, a software layer that runs on top of a number of hardware/OS platforms, and masks the differences.

In this light, an essential feature of Mozilla is backward compatibility between minor revisions. So, 1.0 means: "We're done with the APIs. Please come and hack away with them, we won't break your software".

Could be some time..??

[cybaea]

Given the size of the dependency tree for the 1.0 milestone target it looks like 1.0 could be a little way off??

Does anybody want to take a stab at a date? Does anyboy even want to count the number of bugs on that page? ;-)

Re:Could be some time..??

[riggwelter]

Does anybody want to take a stab at a date?


From the document:
we need to develop a schedule that converges on a stable, useful release in at most five milestones, preferably fewer (but likely no fewer than four).

Now, milestones tend to appear every 4 - 5 weeks, so that would be 16 - 25 weeks time (4 - 6 months)

From the document:
If things go well, we'll be within a milestone of 1.0 after 0.9.9. If 1.0 seems to continually recede as we approach it, our definition of 1.0 in terms of bugs to be fixed is broken. Therefore we will continually review the schedule and the outstanding bugs. If it takes an extra milestone (0.9.10), but 1.0 is reached soon enough, so be it -- but no one should count on an extra milestone. There won't be two or more extra milestones, or again, we will have failed to converge on a short-term stability branch and release within six months.

This would seem to confirm that timescale

Managing scope creep

[aegilops]

I'm sure 1e5 Slashdot readers can give their two penneth in advice for project management, but suffice it to say that nailing scope for your project is a major win. Get stakeholders or key significant people to agree to what you are trying to achieve, what you include in scope, and specifically, what you exclude as out of scope.

Then, for each product or deliverable (something you can touch, or something that now exists when it didn't before etc) that you need to produce, classify them via the acronym MoSCoW:

Must

Should

Could

Won't (i.e. not in this release)

Helps to focus the mind on priorities. Otherwise, an excellent idea and full marks for the announcement so far.

Aegilops

Re:On a related note...

[Anonymous Coward]

It uses IE 5 still blah

Re:Its not a game you know..

[Peejeh]

Actually the current HTML spec is XHTML 1.0 Revision 2 released last week.

Re:Polish?

[Anonymous Coward]

On the off-chance that you aren't kidding, and to prevent genuinely clueless people posting follow-ups, this bug is about "polish", pronounced PAW-lish, as in "buff with a cloth to add shine". Hardy har har.

Re:Its not a game you know..

[hiroko]

The current and last version of HTML is 4.01. HTML is no longer being developed, having been superceeded by XHTML, based upon XML. These are (two of) the standards mozilla team is working to, and future standards will build upon them.

Moz does use its own extensions to the standards, and features of draft standards, but has implemented them in a manner that states them clearly as mozilla (a "moz-" prefix I think).
These extensions are not being encouraged as "wow look at this great feature" but developed to fulfill needs such as assisting the themes capability, or because a developer is particularly interested in it. The advance work is not enabled in all builds, but will give an advantage when the standard is reccommended (complete).

The point of mozillas approach to standards is to get the existing standards working fully and correctly, anything else is a bonus.

(skipping moderation duty to comment :)

Re:Wow, this definition document is amazing..

[cetan]

http://www.necrosys.net/mirrors/mozillazine-moz1.h tml

mirror

Mozilla.org outages as a result of this article

[zachlipton]

I just wanted to keep everyone informed about what is happening to mozilla.org on the server side right now. Bugzilla has currently been shut down as a result of large amounts of database queries, etc, I have talked with those running the servers and this probably wont be up right away, but you never know. Mozillazine.org is also somewhat down (the sql server is dead), but a mirror of the article is availble at http://www.necrosys.net/mirrors/mozillazine-moz1.h tml. www.mozilla.org is still up and should continue to serve out Brendan's words of wisdom.

Please stand by,

Re:what's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Make a PNG image with transparent background.
2. Embed the image in a web page.
3. Change the background of the web page to something other than "white"
4. Open the web page in IE and Mozilla, and compare for yourself.

Another example (CSS2):
1. Make a fixed positioned (style="position: fixed") DIV element
2. Position it somewhere in the middle of the page.
3. View the page in IE and Mozilla

Am I nuts? These are just a few of the many examples how Mozilla renders better than IE. If you're only talking about broken HTML code, IE wins, but I don't see any reason for Mozilla to surpass IE in this area.