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editorials
In addition to being a kind of giant ``switchboard'' for connecting
together the developer community, we feel that one of the most useful roles
mozilla.org can play is that of advocate. The number of people who
want to work on the Mozilla code can be huge, and so we will try to use our
pulpit here to build consensus on what we see as the most important issues,
and thereby arrive at some kind of coherence in the direction of development,
at least for major features and large changes. You could think of these as
the documents that describe the ``core values'' of the project.
- Why Mozilla Matters:
- Our first essay is a piece of unabashed evangelism by longtime
net.personality Paul
Phillips, in which he tries to explain to you why it is in your best
interest to help this project succeed.
- The Mozilla Apologator:
- An apology for why Mozilla is what it is, and how we got here,
for better or for worse.
- Unity of Interface:
- This essay exhorts you to keep in mind what we perceive to be
Mozilla's greatest strength: that it uses the same interface for the same
task, regardless of how the service is implemented on the other end.
We believe that consistency in the user interface is a big part of what
made Mozilla the success that it is today.
- Internationalization:
- This document explains what Internationalization and Localization
(I18N and L10N) are, and why they should matter to you: why it's important
to write code that is localizable and works with all languages, and how
the existing infrastructure in the source can help you do this.
Essays that will be found here in the future will include:
- Cross-platform code:
- Why it's a good thing; an appeal to not fragment the user base with
gratuitously system-specific improvements; why ``it works for me''
is not a long-term plan for survival. (For technical details,
check out the
C++ Portability Guide.)
- Modularity:
- An appeal to add infrastructure before adding features; suggestions
on how one can do both at the same time; how to write a good API.
(For technical details, check out the
Extending Mozilla
document.)
- Backward compatibility:
- Why keeping old web pages (and code) working is of utmost importance;
how to create a new API without breaking the old one, and why you
should care; why mom and pop need your help more than the developers
of the world.
No doubt many of you will see these as obvious, and we will be preaching
to the choir; and that's great. The purpose of these essays is to lay out
those tenets we believe to be most important to the goals of this particular
open-source software project: to produce code that is of the most utility to
the largest number of people.
Contributions of editorials are, of course, welcome. If you would like
to write one, let us know.
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