http://ilovetheopenweb.org/rss.xml

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A bunch of us Mozilla Developer Network folks — web developers, technical writers, developer evangelists and cat herders like me — will be hosting MDN’s first Hack Day in the great city of New York.

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Here are today’s Wiki Wednesday articles! If you know about these topics, please try to find a few minutes to look over these articles that are marked as needing technical intervention and see if you can fix them up.

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This past year we’ve been building the core of a Web-scale identity system. We’ve been calling it BrowserID: our name both for the technology1 and the Mozilla service that implements the technology. Today we’d like to introduce Mozilla Persona, our new name for the complete Identity offering from Mozilla: a collection of components and experiences we’re designing to manage the whole of a user’s online identity with our core values of user control, safety, and convenience.

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A dozen people have come forward since I asked last week for volunteers to make short screencasts showing how they program. I just sent them a sample problem to work on to test things out (see below the fold); the videos they create won’t be made public, but I hope it gives readers an idea of the scale of problems we’re going to be looking at. If you have suggestions for interesting problems of a similar size, please add them as comments on this post.

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Last Saturday’s Hive Toronto HackJam confirmed something for me: one of Mozilla’s biggest opportunities is building a big tent for people teaching web making. This includes teaching things like Hackasaurus and PopcornMaker that we’re building. But it also includes people teaching Scratch, Ruby, Python and even hardware tinkering. We’re all trying to build the same ethos and teach many of the same skills.

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WebFWD is somewhat a “startup of startups,” having launched barely 7 months ago. So if there’s one thing we encourage, it’s the ability to move, act and adapt quickly. While we’re certainly keen to read and learn, we’re also big proponents of just getting stuff done.

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Should communities have a right to
decide how residents get online? It sounds like a simple question. It isn’t.

The notion of self-determination is
fundamental to our self-identify, our politics and the way we construct our
communities. And while we all have different interpretations of what “the right
to self-determination” means, most of us can agree that it’s a bad thing when
governments try to take it away.

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I’m a big fan of RSA Animate videos, and this one by Sir Ken Robinson on our education system definitely seemed to strike a chord with me.
“We have to think differently about human capacity.  We have to get over this old conception of academic, non-academic, abstract, theoretical, vocational…and see it for what it is: a myth.”

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The FreedomBox Hackfest at Columbia University was a huge success. We
hosted 25 people of diverse talents and interests. Some folks came to
learn, acquire DreamPlugs and do a guided install of Bdale Garbee's
FreedomMaker. Others took up parts of the (task
list)[http://freedomboxfoundations.org]. We learned a lot about the
boxes, ideas for routing, data modeling, and security concerns. Lots
of people pitched in on the tasks list, and descriptions of that work
are below. Most importantly, we had a lot of fun meeting each other
and collaborating.

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Before writing yesterday’s post about assessment, I should have explained what I mean by”fundamental concepts”.  I’ll start with Lewis Epstein’s wonderful book Thinking Physics:

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Back in the old days of web development and when CSS2 got support I always cringed at “CSS only” demos as a lot of them were hacky to say the least. With CSS growing up and having real interaction features it seems to me though that it is time to reconsider as – when you think about it – visual effects and interactivity should be maintained in the CSS rather than in JavaScript and CSS.

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I am right now writing a post on how to use :target selectors for image galleries. As always, older IE are the fly in the ointment there as only IE9 supports the selector. So I thought about a way to serve the CSS only to the browsers in the know. The options were of course conditional comments, adding a selector IE < 9 doesn’t understand to every selector I want to filter out (like using

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The Mozilla Toronto office held a hackjam this past weekend for youth.
It’s amazing to see just how much demand there was from kids who want to get their hands dirty and learn more about technology.  But don’t take my word for it.  Check out these awesome photos that Jon Lim captured of the event:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/52869095@N02/sets/72157629401371239/show

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The single biggest challenge Software Carpentry faces right now is how to tell what impact it’s having. This is only partly to satisfy funders—as I said back in December, if we don’t know how to tell if we succeeded, we’re going to fail. It would be (relatively) easy to put together a multiple-choice quiz to see how much people have learned about basic shell commands, the syntax of Python, and so on, but that would only address the shallowest aspects of learning.

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Given all the buzz about angel and seed financing, it’s tempting to think these are easy choices. It’s a good thing we have experts to guide us!

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Whenever there is an open forum to discuss HTML5, you get very interesting questions. Sometimes you also get ones you just facepalm to. One of them was yesterday on Facebook where someone wanted a “simple web in HTML5”. As I was bored watching “revenge of the sith” I thought I give it a go. So here you go – a simple web in HTML5 canvas.

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One of our key deliverables for the Sloan Foundation-funded work is a badging program built on top of Mozilla’s Open Badges Initiative. Riffing on our new logo, Carri Han has designed three badges for us:

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When we started Software Carpentry back in the late 1990s, we used Perl as a teaching language instead of Python. At the time, it was a no-brainer: Perl had many more users, better documentation, and more libraries. We switched because we found ourselves explaining the same inconsistencies over and over again (as I’ve said many times since, every page of the O’Reilly Pocket Guide to Perl used one of the words “except”, “unless”, or “however” at least once).

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On Friday I posted the macro-model here, the thing that encases all the Webmaker Skills. This will give you a general overview of how Mozilla should likely organize it’s learning content (from a pedagogic point of view, which may or may not interest anyone).

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