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IBM Donates Code to Firefox
OS24Ever writes "Internetnews.com is reporting that IBM has donated new DHTML code to the Mozilla foundation specifically targeted as accessability and rich interactive applications (RIA). These new features are expected to be in the next major update of Firefox (v1.5). Is this the first OSS application to get RIA/DHTML support for accessability? I would think this could open some doors for Firefox to replace IE in many Windows environments."
I would really love to see the code. It is in CVS yet? I am rather excited, since I have been working on several RIA things lately. Anyone seen the code yet? Or at the very least, anyone have a more specific list of new functionality?
bash: rtfm: command not found
DHTML is certainly less annoying than 30 second flash intro's, but I want a simple,fast, non-Microsoft browser. I hope this doesn't become a bloated browser like Navigator became.
The Big Yuan - tracking mainland China
Yup, I know, the Flash player isn't open source. But there's an open source compiler, MTASC (*), and with ActionStep, there's a rapidly growing (BSD licensed!) open source component library.
All sorts of nifty open source things are happening with Flash these days; you can track that sort of thing on OSFlash.
(*) Written in Ocaml, how cool is that? (**)
(**) Very.
The Army reading list
accessibility is a wonderful buzzword to stick on your program. its like saying KDE is 'user friendly'.
/dev versions, their inabiltiy to get sound working right (even by someone who has done low level unix programming like JWZ), which would take weeks of time and thousands of dollars of labor, when they can just write it once for windows and maybe macintosh.
actually being accesible and user friendly, thats a whole nother ball game, one that microsoft has been winning for a long time.
accessibility needs to get low level with the hardware. something that is best served by having a stable consistent API to access that hardware. something that linux has never had
and probably never will have because its never
been a priority of the people that lead it.
there is no business logic for an accessibility
company to port their software to the 12 flavors
of linux, their various
it would be not only a waste of their time and money, and possibly endanger their business which i cant imagine is all that stable to begin with, but it would be a disservice to the users.
I'd certainly like for it to open doors but features like these won't really matter unless IE pick up on them, too. The sad reality is that most sites need to work 100% with IE and the attitude towards Firefox/Safari is "if the site's legible, then it's ok". Maybe it can get some headway in some specialized areas, libraries or job centers or some other place where accessibility is a real priority, I don't know. I do however know that the one and only thing that will help Firefox dethrone IE is browser stats. It needs to hit some serious percentage. Only then will people stop "optimizing" for IE and start building their HTML according to standards.
:)
Great job on the DHTML patch, though! This sort of thing is why I use Firefox
I work with websites, but have never done anything specifically toward accessibility. Aren't large subsets of the CSS specifications just for those applications, though? CSS2 and CSS3 have large sections devoted to screen readers, plus most browsers have the capability to scale content to whatever size you want. I'd rather see the Firefox crew make sure they handle CSS3 while keeping the bloat out. It'll keep the browser fast while giving site and application developers the option of using those standards.
Really, can DHTML make it that much easier on someone with an impairment than a well designed site using CSS3?
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
Is that marketingspeak? It seems interesting that something one browser does can be called "missing" from all the rest. I would reserve the "missing" tag for features that are found in the majority of browsers but not in some.
Firefox already adheres to standards better than IE, has a more rubust, and secure environment, and arguably provides a superior user experience to IE, and yet IE lives on... So why would some (arguably nice) DHTML addons make a difference?
I think the situation's kinda like this: Those who care, and/or are "in the know" are already using Firefox.
The rest of the users still left on IE either
- Don't care (lazyness, "not my pc", whatever)
- Are too intimidated by technology to go outside the little box they've created for themselves
- Think IE's still the better browser
I suspect the bulk of the switchers have already switched, and the rest either will not switch until either their OS of choice changes (OSX anyone?), or they are faced with a computer-oriented crime which makes them paranoid about using IE (be it identity theft, stolen cc info, whatever)So while IBM's gift is a "nice to have", I don't see it making a huge difference in the lives of the average IE user. Not at the moment, at least.
Firefox allows site-by-site popup blocking/allowing, would it be too much of a stretch to have the same feature for Javascript?
From my experience, all the new 'pop-unders' that are experienced with Firefox are triggered by Javascript. Of course there are multiple sites that depend on Javascript for core functionality (Gmail, others). So it'd be nice to do a site-by-site feature so that it is easy to put, for example, webshots on the blacklist.
Asa, are you out there and browsing at at least a +2 level?
Yes, I'm well aware of the examples. That is what I've been using so far.
But now read from my previous post:
While the various embedding examples are a start, they are very poorly commented and as such are quite useless.
They're better than nothing, but they're still not enough. Myself and many other developers don't have time to sift through numerous examples for platforms we are not necessarily experienced with. Maybe an unemployed university student has time to play with such examples that lack documentation. Professional developers do not.
Like I mentioned before, the examples need to be very well commented, and must be accompanied by up-to-date and usable design docs. Sure, that takes effort, but it is the key to widespread adoption of Gecko.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
My bet is that IBM is still dreaming of a day where the OS is irrelevent, since all your apps are Java based (perhaps even XUL based) and accessable through a standards compliant browser. IBM has a lot of expertise in this area, and stands to make a really nice chunk of change if customers migrate to this way of getting thier apps.
If Firefox gets above 10% marketshare and stays there, IBM should be able to do real damage to the competition by luring thier customers to more open solutions on the Firefox platform and marketing them as liberation from vendor lock in.
I'd buy into that, myself.
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
Damn, IBM just sold our campus their WebAdapt2Me product which provides assistive technology for visually and motor impaired web surfers. It works only with MSIE.
The basic features of IBM WebAdapt2Me are: font size adjustment, web page magnification (125%, 150%, 175%, etc.) which magnifies the entire page, font selection (bold, inverse bold, font style), kerning (spacing between letters), leading (spacing between lines). These features go way beyond the MS magnifier functions. If true, this is fantastic news that IBM is dontaing the technology to Mozilla.
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Just last night I wanted to show my wife a picture of a Merkur XR4TI, so she'd understand why it was funny that Prinicpal Skinner on The Simpsons drives one...
Procrastination -- because good things come to those who wait.
I believe I saw this code being demonstrated at a recent New York PHP meeting; the IBM guy was tabbing through a tree menu and the voice would say, for example, at what level down the tree the current focus was, the tag in question, whether or not the field was editable and the like. Far and beyond the functionality of, say, JAWS.
The demo was mainly focused on the "ajax" lirary which was a rapid-deployment web-app framework and the accessibility features were an aside, but it was pretty impressive. See here for the code and here for an example app.
grammar-lesson free since 1999. (rescinded - 2005)
I was recently looking into why the filter tag doesn't work in Firefox, and learned that it's actually DHTML. Exploring the question on the Firefox help forums, I learned that these features, (shadows at least) were likely to make it into 1.5 (next version).
Perhaps this means that Firefox was negotiating with IBM to get this code?
I don't know about other developers but I'm seriously beginning to stop supporting IE for anything but a basic HTML interface. All the advanced interface features are designed for Firefox. I have no problem with putting a 'Designed for Firefox.' button on my sites and leaving IE users out of the really cool stuff if IE can't keep up.
I'm seriously playing with some sites that combine AJAX, XUL, and Java into a single powerful user-interface. IE will get the same interface that Lynx users get.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
This is nowhere close to IBM WebAdapt2Me which zooms the entire page, not just fonts and not a separate graphics zoom tool. Their WebAdapt2Me tool has several cool features which let you adjust fonts with different sizes, contrast, or weight. You can quickly change the text from black on white to white on black, as well as adjustments for kerning (space between letters) and leading (space between lines). These are all important for accommodation of various visual, motor, and learning impairments.
WebAdapt2me also provides text-to-speach synthesis. Show me a web browser that does all this today. Adaptive software and hardware are quite a bit more complicated that many Slashdot readers realize.
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You're quite welcome. Thanks for providing us with all of this free code that we have made hundreds of millions from. Our top executives and stockholders and quite happy. Would you like an official IBM polo shirt for all of your effort?
- IBM
I don't respond to AC's.
Through the years of Mosaic dominating, then Netscape dominating, then IE dominating, then Mozilla starting over from scratch, then Firefox starting over from scratch, then Firefox getting some code, it's a lot like watching coal miners in the 60's.
No matter what happens in the world. No matter what problems the world has moved onto, there is always this club which eats, sleeps, and breaths web browsers. They insist that winning back the lost users in 1998 is the most important breakthrough, that it wasn't Mozilla rewrite #20 but this version. This is the version which is going to get back the users they lost to Microsoft in 1998.
Just like coal miners saying the future isn't in space, it's underground, these web browser programmers seem to be eternally in 1998, endlessly chasing after the web browser trophy while maybe the world isn't watching anymore.