I woke up after only a couple of hours of sleep and couldn’t get back to sleep, so I figured I’d go ahead and finish updating the article “Offline resources in Firefox” for Firefox 3.1.  Because of the substantial number of changes to the specification for offline resources, I opted to drop Firefox 3.0.x specific information from the article to avoid being overly confusing.

Hopefully this article is useful; it’s still undergoing some technical review, so if you see anything that doesn’t make sense, or that you know is wrong, feel free to let me know (or, better, fix it for me…).

I’ll be working on writing the reference documentation for the interfaces involved in offline resources in the next day or two, if all goes according to plan.  I’ll of course blog about that when it’s done.

 

I’ve updated the documentation for the Geolocation API in Firefox 3.1 to account for a few changes to the specification and implementation that occurred recently.  This includes updates to the documentation for the nsIGeolocationProvider and nsIDOMGeoPosition interfaces, plus the addition of the documentation for nsIGeoPositionCoords and nsIGeolocationUpdate.

The key changes here are that coordinate information for an update is now stored using the nsIGeoPositionCoords interface, which separates position and movement information from the timestamp provided by nsIGeoPosition.  Additionally, there is no longer an attribute on the nsIGeolocationProvider interface that offers the current position; the position is now only available via callback.

 

First, I figured I’d mention that I’m aware that there are issues with missing strings on the Mozilla Developer Center site’s skin.  I’m not sure how they got misplaced, and we’re investigating it so we can fix it properly.  Everything still functions, it just looks strange.

Second, next week I’ll begin evaluating the upcoming “Lyons” release of the Deki software on a VM at home, so I can start providing feedback to MindTouch on how well it meets the needs of our users and contributors.  I’m aware that some of you guys have very vigorous opinions about the current state of MDC, so I’m going to be trying my best to drive their development in a direction that will make everyone happy.  With over a month until its release, there’ll be time to have further impact on the development as it winds down.

It’s important to note that this release, as well as the last major release (Jay Cooke), is very heavily driven by Mozilla’s needs.  The folks at MindTouch are trying really hard to make us happy, and while they (and I) know there are outstanding issues, they’re doing a lot of work to make it do everything we need.  Please try to be patient a little bit longer!

Once we get upgraded to Lyons, it’ll be time for us to start looking at ways we can augment the capabilities of Deki to customize it for our needs.  Deki is highly extensible, but we’ve so far been avoiding doing any serious customization until the core features get more closely matched to our needs.  I believe that Lyons will accomplish that goal, so it will be time to start work on adding our own whiz-bang goodness to MDC.  We’ll talk more about that as we get closer to doing that.

One other note of importance: I’ve updated the documentation on web workers to match the capabilities and API as it currently stands in prerelease builds of Firefox 3.1 beta 3, as well as the current draft of the specification.  See:

Please let me know of any issues you see.  I’m aware that a sample or two are still missing; those will be dealt with soon.

 

MindTouch has updated the page detailing the upcoming “Lyons” release of Deki, indicating that they expect to release it in mid-February.  This upgrade will address a substantial percentage of the issues brought up by our users and contributors, and should generally make working on MDC and our documentation vastly easier and more productive.

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