You are currently viewing a snapshot of www.mozilla.org taken on April 21, 2008. Most of this content is highly out of date (some pages haven't been updated since the project began in 1998) and exists for historical purposes only. If there are any pages on this archive site that you think should be added back to www.mozilla.org, please file a bug.

Skip to main content


status update

maintained by Chris Nelson <chrisn@statecollege.com>

Last Updated Sunday, May 16, 1999

This status update page is updated every weekend. To get updates and news throughout the week , I invite you to check out mozillaZine, a site I maintain devoted to Mozilla advocacy.

Previous Updates

Friends of the Tree

In a turn from the normal events, I'd like to nominate some folks as friends of the tree. alecf, mscott, putterman, and sspitzer have been doing a great job of fixing warnings, purify errors, portability errors and so on through out the tree. They've saved me uncountable hours of effort. Hopefully I didn't miss anyone from that group. Thanks! -Bruce Mitchener

Module Updates
XPToolkit
May 16
Submitted by Peter Trudelle <trudelle@netscape.com>

Highlights

  • More new and improved documentation.

  • Very encouraging progress on drag & drop (our longest task).
        (see below for details on these)
Lowlights
  • Popup content menus cannot be positioned correctly for M6 due to screen x,y coordinates not being implemented in the DOM event object.  We didn't discover this until testing the code and finding stubs. We are trying to work with Gecko to get this implemented speedily.  In the meantime, the popups will all be displayed at (50,50). (hyatt, saari, joki, vidur)
Accomplishments
  1. Fixed 10 reported bugs in the last week, see our Fixed Bug List for details. Also fixed some unknown number of other, unreported bugs.

  2. Reworked and re-implemented parts of Clipboard and the D&D interfaces and classes. We removed nsIGenericTransferable and nsIDataFlavor, data flavors are now strings. (rods, pinkerton)

  3. Delivered Font Retriever API.  Some questions remain with respect to outline-based fonts (which can be rendered at any point size).    SCC thinks these questions have fairly easy answers for us, however.  (scc, rods)

  4. Completed Font discovery implementation for Windows. (rods)

  5. Landed Carbon changes into tip of Mozilla source. (pinkerton)

  6. Got Ender to recognize and accept plaintext drags from external applications like NotePad on MacOS. This means events are being routed correctly. (pinkerton)

  7. Moved several widget implementations from pseudo-class attributes to real pseudo classes :active, :hover, :focus. (evaughan)

  8. Built box test cases and box based dialogs tests. (evaughan)

  9. Wrote and posted a report on code bloat, giving the results of some code generation size tests comparing raw pointers, nsCOMPtrs, and `nsIPtr's.  (scc)

  10. Came up with a solution for some Ender command propagation problems.  David Hyatt turned the  proposal into a spec. (scc, hyatt)

  11. Wrote/updated specs for  Tree Widget,  Tab Widget,  Progress Meter,  Checkbox (Tri-state),  Broadcasters and Observers. (hyatt)

  12. Outlined a new scheme for RDF->XUL translation that obviates the need for hard-coded content model builders and allows us to turn RDF graphs into arbitrary XUL trees (unscheduled).  Robert Churchill is working on implementing this. (hyatt)

  13. Popup Content (hyatt):
    Added support for the popup, context, and tooltip attributes. Implemented the new nsIXULPopupListener interface for observing popups.
    Modified the Window IDL to add a new method for creating popups.

  14. Landed Solaris XPConnect. (mcafee, ???)

  15. Landed Clipboard mini-carpool. (rods, pinkerton, mcafee)
Priorities
  1. Resolve the remaining open M6 bugs (currently 41, 27 untargeted).

  2. Implement native widget visibility to enable their use in tab widget decks. (evaughan, kmcclusk, karnaze)

  3. Finish scrollbar implementation. (evaughan)

  4. Font discovery for GTK. (rods)

  5. Document Drag & Drop interfaces. (rods)

  6. Update Clipboard docs. (rods)

  7. Drag & drop implementation (pinkerton, mcafee)

  8. Convert AppCores to Components, now that XPConnect is ready. (scc)

  9. Finish popup content in menus. (hyatt, saari)

  10. Focus implementation. (hyatt).

  11. Write popup content spec. (saari,hyatt)

  12. Finish and document openDialog. (danm)

  13. OpenDialog modality (danm)

  14. XUL chrome set. (danm)

  15. Finish up service to convert Win32 centric file extension filters to Mac types. (sdagley)

    16.  
Decisions

Issues

  • Tree horkages are getting worse.  We are working with Chris Yeh to improve the situation.

  • Unix platform-specific bugs are expanding beyond the capacity for them to be dealt with within the module-owner's team (i.e, mcafee is getting too many from Gecko).  This further strains our extremely limited ability to get Linux implementation work done. We need more Linux brainpower!

  • Windows build instructions are not explicit enough for well-intentioned Win32 newbies from other platforms (especially Mac) who are trying to test their code everywhere. PATHs and other environment variables are a foreign concept for some...
People
  • Scott Collins is once again working offsite in Michigan. (scc)

  • Steve Dagley will be in FL 5/28 through 6/2.  Back in the office 6/3. (sdagley)
Javascript and XPConnect
May 17
Submitted by Scott Furman <fur@netscape.com>

Scott writes:

"XPConnect is now part of the build on all platforms!

Header files and .xpt typelib files are generated on-the-fly from .idl files for the Windows and unix builds. XPIDL is ready to go, and by the time you read this, these files will be generated at build time for the Mac as well. (Building on the Macintosh now requires installing the XPIDL compiler; if you build on the Mac, you'll want to look at the updated Mac build page.)

By writing interfaces in .idl, we get transparent scriptability of C++ from Javascript without any compile-time glue whatsoever. Drop-in modules are also scriptable with no recompilation needed. To try it out, build xpcom/sample and point mozilla to the html page there.

So far, rdf and mail/news are defined in XPIDL, and some of the AppCores modules are coming along as well. We recently made a change to allow DOM elements to be used with XPConnect as well, so as to reduce the barriers to transitioning to XPConnect.

Note: XPConnect depends on the xptcall module to dynamically call C++ interfaces. If xptcall hasn't yet been ported to your platform, you will not be able to run mozilla. Drop us an email if you might be able to help port or test for your platform."

NGLayout
May 14
Submitted by Rick Gessner <rickg@netscape.com>

Rick Gessner has this NGLayout update:

The Raptor folks have been focused on performance, stability and getting to feature complete for HTML 4.0, CSS, DOM and XML.
Notable improvements include:

  • Linux:
    • rendering performance work

  • Mac
    • Frame handling bug fixes

  • GFX Widgets
    • Option groups nearly done

    • Making listbox more generic

  • Layout
    • Firstline/firstletter bug fixes

    • DIR support from inline frames (pretty cool)

    • Webshell API improvements

  • Frame/DOM connections

  • JS Security work

  • Frameset printing

  • Parser
    • residual style handling

    • better handling misplaced content

    • better script support

    • performance improvements in doctype detection

    • Fragment interfaces (for paste)
Editor
May 14
Submitted by Akkana Peck <akkana@netscape.com>

Akkana Peck has our Editor update::

  • Save and Save As are hooked up -- woohoo!

  • Dialogs: image and link dialogs are working better, 90% complete (modulo dialog bugs, different on different platforms). A new page http://www.mozilla.org/editor/ui_specs/Composer_5_Dialogs_Multimode.html discusses some new UE suggestions regarding splitting most of our dialogs into Basic and Advanced sections.

  • The spelling checker dialog has been wired up and put in place; anyone wanting to plug a spelling checker in needs to implement nsISpellChecker.

  • Wrapping support has been added in the plaintext editor.

  • Fixed bugs to make the M6 editor more solid.
Mail/News
May 14
Submitted by Phil Peterson <phil@netscape.com>

Phil Peterson has news regarding the Mail/News client:

This week

  • HTML composition is in using the editor widget. Applying HTML attributes and multipart messages coming soon.

  • News is more usable, since we're telling RDF there are fewer messages than there really are. News is also working on all three platforms.

  • IMAP runs on all three platforms (although was unintentionally omitted from a Linux makefile)

  • The MIME parser builds URLs out of www.mozilla.org and test@mozilla.org, in addition to http://www.mozilla.org and mailto:test@mozilla.org as it used to. It can also turn emoticons into images.

  • Marking messages read works

  • We have early UI (XUL only, no C++ code) on the Address Book card editor, the Search Messages dialog, the Filters dialog, and the Account Manager dialog.

  • Resolved issue on multiple accounts design: one SMTP server only. Maybe some people need one per account, but we think they're a subset, and without dialer integration, this seems like the simplest generally useful solution.

  • Workaround for 5450 makes Mac and Linux three pane window look better.
Next week
  • Our expectation is that performance will impove when we get a fix for 3367 (for M6) and hyatt's "tree body scrolling optimizations" (for M7). Then we'll see where we are, but we don't expect those to be the last performance issues.

  • Massive scheduling work underway for post-M9 work. Feature cuts are doubtless in our future. Now would be a really good time for some external folks to dive in.

  • Scheduling work pre-empted work on Multiple Accounts spec, so that should make progress next week.

  • Meeting with Gecko and Navigator folks to resolve doc loader issues: how to run URLs in the right kind of window, how to do MIME type matchine.

  • XPConnect-izing pushed out to M7.

  • Triage M6 bugs
Footprint watch
  • Win32: 875k. Pretty much every component is 10-20k larger, including the tiny MIME emitters which didn't grow on Mac. Looks like something broke in the build system this week.

  • Mac: 1537k. Added News and IMAP this week, but each are much larger than on Win32, so that seems broken. Also added vcard, which is about the same size as on Win32.

  • Linux: 1481k. About the same as last week. IMAP component coming next week.

 

Previous Updates