I invite you all to give it a spin:

Working on After the Deadline for Firefox gave me my first experience creating an add-on from the ground up and I’ve learned a lot. After working on Ubiquity and dabbling with Jetpack, it’s given me another perspective on extensibility on the web and I look forward to thinking and writing more about these experiences in the near future.

In the mean time, happy proofreading!

This past weekend I gave a couple talks at the inaugural WordCamp Boston. WordCamps are local, community-organized events for WordPress users and enthusiasts. We had about 400 people at the Microsoft Cambridge campus.

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Shadowbox is organized around different “players”—one for each kind of media that will be displayed. The library by default comes with players for Flash, HTML fragments, iframes, QuickTime, and Windows Media. Some of these players, like those for images and video, automatically recognize the media size and adjust the lightbox accordingly, while others such as the iframe player can use a set size or can fill the screen. For the Edgerton site, though, we had a need for displaying an iframe but in the dimensions of a set image, so that we could display the image with an overlay. Here are some notes on how to implement a custom player for Shadowbox.

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1. Confusing ids and classes. ids should be unique on the page… but here’s an instance of using multiple instances of the same id in order to format them together.
   

<div id="indent"> <div id="number">4.2.1</div> <div id="page">161</div> <div id="section">Old French (Adams 1987)</div>
</div> <div id="indent"> <div id="number">4.2.2</div> <div id="page">164</div> <div id="section">The evolution of the dialects of northern Italy</div>

1. Putting a class on every instance of something. Everything paragraph should be formatted equivalently. We get the point.
   

<p class=MsoNormal><b>The English Noun Phrase in Its Sentential Aspect</b></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>Steven Paul Abney</p>
<p class=MsoNormal>May 1987</p>

1. Using blank space for formatting.
   

<p class=MsoNormal><o:p>&amp;nbsp;</o:p></p>

1. CSS styles that don’t exist. Browsers just ignore these anyway…
   

<p class=MsoNormal>One factor in determining which worlds a modal quantifies
over is the temporal argument of the modal’s accessibility relation.<span
style='mso-spacerun:yes'>  </span>It is well-known that a higher tense affects
the accessibility relation of modals.<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'> 
</span>What is not well-known is that there are aspectual operators high enough
to affect the accessibility relation of modals.<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'> 
</span&gt

The solution

My solution was to write a perl script which takes care of a number of these issues. It’s not foolproof and doesn’t involve any voodoo—for example, it can’t retypeset things which were formatted using whitespace—but it does a good job as a first pass.

You can run the script by making it executable (chmod +x cleanwordhtml.pl) then specifying a target filename as an argument. For example,

./cleanwordhtml.pl source.html > clean.html

I used this with a simple bash for loop to run over all my files:

for f in */*.html; do ./cleanwordhtml.pl $f > ${f%.html}-clean.html; done;

Hopefully someone else can benefit from my experience.

Being a longer time slot than I previously have used to talk about Ubiquity, I decided to dedicate a good portion of the talk to Jetpack. Being outside of Mozilla for the past few months, this gave me an opportunity to get reacquainted with the Jetpack APIs. I myself was impressed by how easy it was to develop a quick Jetpack. I ended up preparing two to live-code during the talk: one called Helvetica which, with one click, replaces all fonts on the current page with Helvetica; and You Are Here which uses an open API from IPinfoDB to display the physical location of the domain you are currently visiting in the status bar. Both are now on the Jetpack Gallery.

Unfortunately there was a bit of a snowstorm leading up to the event, but there was still a nice turnout and I got to meet some fantastic people there. Ken Shoemake of slerp and quaternion fame came up to me after my talk and said “the Ubiquity parser reminded me of the dancing bear… it’s less surprising that it works well as that it works at all.” I also enjoyed the other great presentations in the technology track, covering the virtues of REST and basic iPhone development.

Mashup the Browser with Ubiquity and Jetpack

My talk was a general introduction to WordPress plugin development, beginning with the concepts of actions and filters, and concluding with a description of HookPress, my new plugin which enables webhooks in WordPress. Here are the slides:

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Time working for Mozilla: 6.5 months

Mozilla-related blog posts written: 69

Academic papers written on Ubiquity: 1

Ubiquity presentations given: 5

Screencasts made: 8

Most popular video on Vimeo: Ubiquity 0.5 日本語紹介ビデオ, the Japanese Ubiquity 0.5 introduction video: 2252 views

Languages Ubiquity commands and parser now support: 6

Commits to the Ubiquity repository: 492

Other web projects started during this period: 2+ (Ten Grand Is Buried There, HookPress)

TechCrunch references: 2 (1, 2)

Countries worked in: 2

Mythical Kiwis worked with: 1

References to bugs I introduced as “glitcho”s: 1

Extremely disturbing homages to me and Django: 1

Friends made; experience gained; lessons on Open-ness learned; personal growth: priceless enumerable

Thanks to all who made this experience amazing, beginning with Aza, Jono, Atul, Blair and the rest of the Labs team; intern extraordinaire Brandon; the always thoughtful and friendly Mozilla Japan team; and of course the fantastic Ubiquity community! Please visit me in Boston—I should be around for a while.

This week I implemented a new way to customize and extend Ubiquity commands: CmdUtils.CreateAlias.

The use case for and importance of CreateAlias

CreateAlias lets you easily create a special-case alias of another, more generic verb. Ubiquity comes bundled with useful verbs like translate and search which can be used for a number of different uses based on their arguments. In some cases, and in some languages, though, typing out translate to English or search with Google is unnatural, though, as there is a more succinct and direct way to make that request. For example, in English one could say “anglicize” or “google”, respectively, for the verbs and arguments above. Indeed, in order to support both search with Google and google, Ubiquity traditionally has implemented two different verbs, search and google, which duplicate functionality and code.

CreateAlias lets us create such natural aliases without repeating ourselves. We can easily create an anglicize verb which, in one word, does the work of translate to English, or google which is semantically equivalent to search with Google.

These sorts of aliases become particularly important in our perpetual quest to internationalize Ubiquity. One discussion that came up early on on our Ubiquity-i18n list is the fact that not all languages have the verb “Google”: in many languages it is necessary to explicitly say “search with Google”. Moreover, other languages may have other domain-specific verbs which English doesn’t have either. Maybe some language has a special verb for “email with Hotmail” or “map Denmark”. Who knows? With CreateAlias we can easily enable such localizations based on the more generic commands bundled with Ubiquity.

Creating an alias

CreateAlias was designed to be incredibly simple to use. Here’s an example that will be bundled (but not installed by default) in Ubiquity:

CmdUtils.CreateAlias({
  names: ["anglicize"],
  verb: "translate",
  givenArgs: { goal: "English" }
});

As you see, this syntax is incredibly straightforward. There are two required properties, names, an array of names for the alias, and verb, a reference to the target verb that this alias should use.¹

The alias can also have a givenArgs property which is a hash of pre-specified arguments with their semantic roles. Because translate takes three arguments (an object text, a goal language, and a source language) but we have pre-specified a goal in the givenArgs, the new anglicize command will only take two arguments: the object text and a source language. Of course, if you specify no givenArgs, you’ll get a simple synonym without having access to the original verb’s code.

As you see, the preview of this command is simply the preview of the translate verb. Its preview and execution is just as if you had entered translate こんにちは to English.

Just like other commands created with CreateCommand, the object specifying the alias can also have properties like help, description, author information, and so on. I used the icon property to add a Union Jack to it so that it was easily identifiable.

Bonus: using CmdUtils.previewCommand and CmdUtils.executeCommand

On the road to implementing CreateAlias, I also implemented the CmdUtils.previewCommand and CmdUtils.executeCommand functions. The majority of this code comes from previous work by Louis-Rémi Babé, though I adapted it to the modern Ubiquity system. Using previewCommand and executeCommand you can take advantage of the preview or execute functionality of another command. In the new alias-commands feed I included a command called germanize which essentially is a straightforward analogy to anglicize, seen above, but using these functions within a CreateCommand. While CreateAlias is much more straightforward for simple aliases, for more complex subcommands where you would like to adapt another verb’s execution or preview, or only take one of those but re-implement the other part, previewCommand and executeCommand are the way to go.

I recently have begun giving serious thought to what command chaining might look like in Ubiquity and the various considerations which must be made to make it happen. The “command chaining,” or “piping,” described here always involves (at least) two verbs acting sequentially on a passed target—that is, the first command performs some action or lookup and the second command acts on the first command’s output.

A few days ago I penned some initial technical considerations regarding command chaining. In this post I’ll be point out some linguistic considerations involved in supporting a natural syntax for chaining.

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In order to facilitate this discussion, we created the Persistence tool. With the Persistence tool you can quickly try out new design and interaction ideas, mocking things up with some simple jQuery-powered JavaScript and CSS and see your changes live. The Persistence tool is bundled with our latest Ubiquity beta (install link).

The Ubiquity Persistence Project: exploring a persistent Ubiquity in the toolbar from mitcho on Vimeo.

I just put together a screencast introducing the initiative, demoing the Persistence tool, as well as talking about this project’s relation to the ongoing work on Taskfox. We’ll look forward to your comments and designs!

Today I hope to cover some of the technical considerations required in implementing command chaining in Ubiquity, and I will follow up soon with a blog post on the linguistic considerations required as well.

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The short story:

Inspired by some comments by Blair, yesterday I was able to make significant (roughly 100%) performance gains in Parser 2, resulting in 40-60% faster parses, depending on the query. This change has been committed and will be released as part of our forthcoming minor update, Ubiquity 0.5.4. Yay!

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