on the future of the fox

I blogged elsewhere about the "state of the user art", drawing attention to the ways in which the open (libre, gratis) clients of this RESTful web are once more struggling to catch up, which caught the attention of Ryan Stewart, then  Chris, who vlogged and heard back from Mitchell herself, and the newly christened MozPad "Moon" community.

Over the summer, part of my research will try to make use of the openness of the current Web to make itself even better, but as of right now I'm still trying to finish up a few research projects and playing with the latest nightly build -- "Minefield" -- of Firefox 3 alpha 5.

The integration of Cairo seems to make East Asian language typography that much nicer for typesetting in the small, but I do miss Camino's beauty and, as a web developer, the facility of web-app prototyping that Adobe and MSFT tool chains promise us.

I ask myself, for example, if I wanted to build my own HacketyHack, how many hoops would I have to jump through to get it working on a MozPad moon versus an Adobe Apollo or a MSFT Expression Blend?

And while John "jQuery" Resig's FUEL is a start, I have to wonder if JavaScript libraries are more of a nice beginning than a way forward for the WHATG web.

Besides lending a non-corporate voice to the MozPad crew, and contributing open source energies to a "fast and delightful HTML parser" written in Ragel-Ruby, my few suggestions to the MozCo MoFo orgs are these:

1) In the Foo Bar Baz SuperHappy-syle of unconferencing, instead of holding an "active Mozilla developers"-only set of days, bring in folks who want to write the next HacketyHack or myEBayFox, who want to be the next Blake Ross or build little apps to make their web apps just a little easier to use.

Moon camp anyone?

2) Clients are starting to look more like servers (IronRuby on the client, too) and servers are starting to look a little more clients, as back-end engineers learn JavaScript and front-end engineers learn Rails. While these once were two very different worlds, client and server, I think it still pays to take a lesson from Matz, like DHH did, and focus on how the programmer feels while programming. Firebug makes you feel great. Can we do the same for extending how we browse/interact/play/communicate on the web, too?

We need not fully address the question of End-user Programming of the client-side web, but even if we deCOMtaminate Mozilla-land, how much better off does that leave us? I would call for, instead, a RESTfully organic Firefox.

We use del.icio.us and ma.gnolia.com, gmail and 30b, why not take their lead and self-host Firefox's top-level components with RESTfully localhost (!) web services, HacketyHack Mongrel Merb-style, rather than try to dig our way out of the kingdom of XPCOM.

GoogleAmaYahoo have shown that web services work on a global scale. How come I can't roll out my own personal web services for bookmarking, dealing with a microformatted web, or even just personalizing my own web UX?

3) MozCo and MoFo -- Mozilla Corporation and Mozilla Foundation -- is neither some faceless for-profit corporation nor some green-blood bleeding non-profit. It's both but neither, which, as Mitchell points out, is somewhat confusing.

My final suggestion is this. Perhaps we should think of MozCo + MoFo not as some conjoined twin of corp. and 501(c)3, but as a social business.

What's that? In the words of Nobel Laureate Yunus,

A social business will be a non-loss, non-dividend company

Now, that's a vision I can get behind.

Many young people today feel frustrated because they cannot see any worthy challenge, which excites them, within the present capitalist world. Socialism gave them a dream to fight for. Young people dream about creating a perfect world of their own...

We get what we want, or what we don't refuse. We accept the fact that we will always have poor people around us, and that poverty is part of human destiny. This is precisely why we continue to have poor people around us. If we firmly believe that poverty is unacceptable to us, and that it should not belong to a civilized society, we would have built appropriate institutions and policies to create a poverty-free world.

We wanted to go to the moon, so we went there. We achieve what we want to achieve. If we are not achieving something, it is because we have not put our minds to it. We create what we want.

What do you want? Do tell, do tell. Tell, and then do!