I’ve taken a big break in MOOzilla documentation writing to implement a DOM2 interface on MOO Canada. Wheeha! It took me hours of planning last night to come up with a way to do it that would not involve a server hack to allow circular waif references.
When completed, MC will have a nice clean DOM2 implementation that is actually reference counted, not garbage collected, though a series of magic levers and spells. It’s very slick. Basically, references are only kept going up the tree, and copies of WAIFs as text are kept going down the tree. It works surprisingly well.
I mentioned briefly on my personal weblog this morning that my navigation tooly thingy didn’t seem to work in MSIE 6. I found and located the problem, and wrote this message to *webtalk on MC to talk about it:
I was not surprised this morning to find that a new bit of javascript code I had written did not work in MSIE 6. I hadn’t previously had a chance to test it it anything other than Mozilla, but it used nothing but DOM level 1 to do its work… but I still wasn’t surprised to find it didn’t work.
I was surprised to find out why it didn’t work. I had encoded my scripts as <script language=”JavaScript” type=”application/x-javascript”>, which looks nice and proper. The ‘language’ attribute is depreciated in favour of the ‘type’ attribute in HTML 4… but with that type attribute, my scripts weren’t being run at all in MSIE6. MSIE6 does not support ‘application/x-javascript’, which I’d gotten used to using as a MIME type in Mozilla.
In the process of figuring out why it doesn’t, I’ve read that it might even be correct. MSIE6 does not have an implementation of JavaScript, but rather its own ‘JScript’ implementation of the ECMA Script standard. So, the proper type for this script oughta be ‘text/ecmascript’, which MSIE 6 understands. …… and …. wait for it …. Mozilla doesn’t.
However, both MSIE6 and Mozilla execute ‘text/javascript’ script types. I think it was a compromise, Mozilla wanted ‘application/x-javascript’ and MSIE6 wanted ‘text/ecmascript’, so they came out with ‘text/javascript’. In summary, web standards are good, I just wish they were better.
This web page has been extremely helpful in determining which script types are supported: http://www.robinlionheart.com/stds/html4/scripts.html
I just love the web. All those computers working together based upon mutual understanding thanks to beautiful standards. But I think we were better off with gopher and telnet.
Spent most of my day working on the MOOZilla help documentation once again. It’s amazing how much time one can pour into writing and never get very far. Technical documentation takes a lot of work… I spend my time trying to imagine, ‘If I wanted help on the ‘Connect’ menu option… what would I want to know? It’s a pretty simple option… but if I looked in the help for it, what am I looking for? ‘.
The surprising thing is the massive amount of groth that MOOzilla will go through for it’s next release. This documentation will eventually include colourful images of MOOzilla being used in various scary ways by people. Currently I’m writing just the section on how to use MOOzilla as a MOO/MUD client, and I already have bumped the MOOzilla size up to about 290k, from its previous 75k. The documentation for how to build with MOOzilla will be very pictureful to be as useful as possible… or at least, I guess I’d like it to be.
Maybe I could make MOOzilla mock-ups using the same HTML rendering that MOOzilla uses itself. This oughta be smaller than using pictures of the rendered text…
… something about that makes me feel uncomfortable. Well, I’ll try it out when I get to the building section of the documentation.
My current feature list for 0.9.9:
- Documentation (1-2 weeks)
- Stand-Alone MOOzilla distributions for Windows and Linux. No Mozilla installation required, just gecko and other technologies bundled together. (1-2 weeks)
- Monospaced input windows, single + multi line. (2-3 days, if possible at all w/ XUL+XBL…)
- Save log as web page (1 hour)
The biggest problem with this plan for 0.9.9 is that the stand-alone distributions will be for platforms I don’t have access to. Teehee… this means MOOzilla 0.9.9 is probably planned for release around Christmas, after I do have access to an x86 computer to do some development with.
Began writing MOOzilla’s documentation today. Spent quite a bit of time figuring out how to get stuff to work right, and then writing a python program to create a table of contents out of an HTML file. In the end, the MOOzilla documentation will be viewable using MOOzilla’s builtin help viewer, which creates a nice little interface for a table of contents, index, glossary, and search functionality.
The documentation will also be put on MOOzilla’s web site, purely in HTML. Hopefully it will be useful. I just would love to hear from people as to what would be useful in the documentation, but … everyone is dead, it seems. So I’ll just pour dozens of hours of work into this documentation with absolutely no knowledge as to whether it will be useful to the universe or not. Maybe I’m just burning my time.
I’ve joined Cecil in reviving our perpetually dying MOOD project. Based upon a brand new MOO Canada core, we’ve begun the process of building a MUD-like game in a MOO.
Currently things are looking pretty good. Cecil is doing a lot of design work on paper, and I’ve been plowing ahead with smashing stuff. I hope I smash things like he’s planning! :)