A day after getting back home from Norway, I took off for Whistler, British Columbia (taking my Scandinavian jetlag with me) to attend the Mozilla Summit.  In case you haven’t heard yet, here’s a brief summary of the various adventurous goings on: on Day 1, a traveler with worse jet lag than me saw a black bear rummaging through garbage; on Day 2, the Sea to Sky Highway collapsed, leaving us stranded atop the beautiful glacier park; on Day 3, the power went out in the conference hotel.  I opted out of the 8 hour bus drive back to Vancouver, and chose to circumvent the rock slide via sea plane  It was just… splendid.  I documented the whole thing in my Moz08 Flickr set.

I gave two talks at the summit — one on standards (links to my slides and a blog post summarizing what we talked about), and one with Seth Bindernagel on Firefox in India, my particular passion.  The India discussion occured on Day 3, when there was no power in the hotel.  So, a group of interested parties huddled around my laptop in a semi-circle, and we had a small, intimate and dimly lit discussion in a small room about fonts, the Indian government’s e-governance initiatives, and the propagation of standards-based platforms.  I had a deja vu moment when I realized that so many problems with the top Indian sites reminded me of the early era of callow markup, when the evangelism team was first constituted.  Seth and I are going to talk to major Indian ISVs about Mozilla, and plan some workshops to coincide with foss.in in November. India is like the new old frontier of the Web; proprietary stuff (like MSHTML particularities and Microsoft’s Dynamic Fonts) still permeate the marketplace. At the same time, the comScore data about India tells us that it has “one of the fastest growing Internet populations.”  It is high time Mozilla did something there.

See what I mean by eventful two weeks? Scandinavia and the Canadian Rockies, all for the Web.

But let’s talk about the web platform. Stagnant, really? Innovation at Mozilla ultimately manifests itself as innovation for the web platform. Let’s leave the intricacies of the standards process for another discussion — it isn’t ideal, and big questions about consortia (like W3C and ECMA) are probably valid ones. Great ideas are vetted for interoperability in forums such as the WHATWG, and the W3C’s WebApps WG, and we browser vendors deliver as rapidly as feasible on implementations (some are slower than others — you know who you are). Both IE8 Beta and Firefox 3 now support postMessage, for example, so talk of AJAX methodologies being stagnant ought to be revisited. And support of Canvas2D in browsers such as Opera, Safari, and Firefox results in stellar innovations such as processing.js, which — any “open platform” chauvinism on my part notwithstanding — gives Flash a royal run for its money.

Mozilla’s involvement in standards encompasses enhancements to JavaScript, graphics, and APIs for new capabilities. Below is a breakdown of the work that will eventually be a part of the web platform. Don’t stop and stare for too long — there is nothing stagnating here

• Evolving the AJAX backbone essentially means adding new capabilities to the XMLHttpRequest object, which is really the skinny man on stilts behind the AJAX wizard. Currently, the XMLHttpRequest object (abbreviated XHR) can’t cross the single domain threshold, but we’re working on a “mitigation” mechanism to allow cross-domain access called Access Control, which will be used by API containers such as XHR Level 2. Allowing Cookies and HTTP-Authentication mechanisms for safer cross-domain mashups is controversial, certainly, and safety is paramount. Amongst the topics to consider are interoperability with Microsoft’s equally controversial XDomainRequest object, introduced in IE8 Beta. The WebApps Working Group’s progress has been good; I expect this feature to be released in Firefox 3.next. Our long term goals ought to be to clean up the existing legacy of “ad-hoc” cross-domain access mechanisms on the web, and introduce safer primitives to give developers the capability of doing safe mashups.

• The Canvas3D initiative brings 3D graphics to the web, exposing an OpenGL 3D context to JavaScript via the canvas element. Pretty cool, eh? This allows 3D modeling on the web, with the potential of a low-level API that does the OpenGL stuff, possibly allowing for use of a shading language and even modeling formats like Collada. There’s also the possibility of a higher level layer of abstraction for 3D graphics in general. We’re raring to talk to the appropriate standards group, as well as get feedback on early implementations (check out Vlad’s extension).

• Worker Threads in JavaScript allow for abstraction around multiple threads exposed to web content, and allows for inter-thread communication using an API like postMessage. Use cases envision dedicated “background” processes happening asynchronously (and communicating with other processes on the spawning page). Proposals abound; Google Gears, WHATWG, and Mozilla’s DOM Worker Threads all have skin in the game, and we’re all working to arrive at a single straw person which will evolve either in the WHATWG or in the W3C WebApps WG, where it was proposed.

• Introducing SVG capabilities in CSS goes some of the way towards addressing the concern that the web stack consists of separate technologies that don’t “live together” well. Mozilla’s Robert O’Callahan blogged first about extending SVG’s notions of filter, mask and clip-path, and then about extending SVG paint servers. The resultant demos are …. just pretty darn awesome. In an ideal world, these would be extensions to the CSS charter, since these make the capabilities of SVG exposed to CSS.

• The birth of the Geolocation API for JavaScript was originally fraught with some small dissonance about where in the W3C the activity would live. In the WebApps Working Group, or in a newly minted Geolocation Working Group? It looks a lot like for reasons of corporate machinery (as well as, honestly, modular specification management), the Geolocation work will take place in a separate working group, despite objections from Mozilla, Opera, Apple, and Google (we’ll all still likely participate). Andrei Popescu from Google is a promising editor of the nascent specification, which reconciled ideas from Google’s Gears team as well as Mozilla’s Geolocation proposal.

• ECMAScript 3.1 and ECMAScript 4 are both enhancements to the defacto programming language of the web (and will manifest themselves in JavaScript and ActionScript — some things aren’t totally proprietary anymore, and both “proprietary” and “open” are words that ought to be used in an informed way). ECMAScript 3.1 proposes to recognize some “reality on the web” as well as introduces notions around safe subsets. ECMAScript 4 introduces “evolutionary” enhancements to ECMAScript — think classes and structural types in JavaScript

Anyone that thinks the web is standing still while proprietary models out-maneuver us ought to be disabused of that notion.

Something stuck, because by early 2001, I was working for Netscape as Technology Evangelist on Mozilla.

This was the heyday of the Browser Wars, and I found myself becoming an ardent advocate of open standards. I worked for an awesome team, including Bob Clary, Marcio Galli, Tristan Nitot, and Eric Meyer. We were intrepid and had a mission. I was talking to Bank of America and Wells Fargo and Citibank about browser detection; to Macromedia and Microsoft and Adobe (and others) about plugin API support; to page authors about the standards-based DOM; to my friends about why Netscape (and Mozilla) was better than IE. We wrote prototypes of new applications using XMLHttpRequest (if only we also coined catchy acronyms!), and were tasked with pushing the web forward.

Netscape was part of AOL. And while we didn’t listen to the naysayers (there were plenty within AOL, and plenty outside it, and they were fueled by the dubious quality of Netscape 6), by June of 2003 I was sitting in meetings with lawyers about the antitrust litigation against Microsoft. I had to rebut the “expert witness testimony” of a Microsoft technologist, and felt righteous indignation as well as copious stress. Later that summer, the edifice crumbled definitively, and AOL layed off Netscape’s Client Engineering team en masse. It was heartbreaking. I went on to do other things.

But out of that detritus, a Firefox was born. And what a Firefox it has become! The Wall Street Journal says it is the best out there, period. A whopping five years later I’m back working on Mozilla. In April, I joined the Evangelism Team at Mozilla, and I’ll continue agitating for standards. Expect to see me post here about WebAPIs, markup, test cases, and the litany of usual themes.

What goes around, comes around, almost five years to the day (recall what I said about the general synchronicity of summer). Today is Download Day. By 10a.m. PST, help us break the Guinness Book of World Records by downloading Firefox 3.

Thank you. For two years, you’ve put up with my jittery nagging a few hours before the panel, and for two years, it has rocked.

Dear Apple,

We really missed you. Our “Browser Wars” panel at SxSWi ‘08 was standing room only, with people lining up outside who couldn’t get in. We discussed stuff that was really relevant to Safari, touching on mobility, standards, security, JavaScript, and stuff like that — PC Mag has a rough record of the conversation. People love your stuff — the MacBook Pro and the iPhone were ubiquitous at the Austin Convention Center. And while you are open in your standards participation (working groups like Web API and HTML conduct business in the open), and while you are candid on the Surfin’ Safari Weblog, it would be great if your PR / Marketing department could let you come out and play with us. Maybe next year?

Dear SxSWi 2008 Organizers,

You gave us a great time slot this year (thanks, Hugh!) — 2PM on Monday, which beats last year’s early morning time slot. And I recognize that organizing this conference is tough, and you guys do a great job every year. But maybe if we do this next time, you could get us a bigger room? People were literally turned away this year. Maybe if we had a bigger room, like some of the other panels, this wouldn’t be the case? Designers and developers are deeply interested in browsers and Web technology — they are fundamental to the often odd trade we ply.

Dear SxSWi Audience,

Thank you. You make the show, every year. You’ve shown that you will stage an insurrection if you aren’t treated with dignity and respect. Thank you for the great questions and the spirited hallway discussions. Thank you for discussing broader societal things as well, like gender bias, with such insightful analysis. May our tribe prosper, but prosper equitably.

Young-ish trendy persons with laptops and iPhones and loosely slung satchels meander around the Austin Convention Center. Panels are being held, and the sun is shining (mostly), and the after parties are kicking, and film makers, musicians, designers, and geeks are all coalescing, as per the norm.

Last year, I chaired a panel bringing Brendan Eich (Mozilla/Firefox, and inventor of JavaScript), Chris Wilson (Microsoft/IE, worked on every version of IE in recent memory), and Charles McCathieNevile (Opera — a standards titan who travels the world working on standards) to the table to discuss where the Web was going. It was a great panel discussion which embraced spirited debate.

A year has passed, and PC Magazine thinks we’re about ready to usher in the “boring era” of Web browsers. Really? A little bit like the End of History, where things were supposed to be all nice and boring after the end of the Cold War, but ended up being anything but?

OK, look. I’ll be the first to admit that the term “wars” shouldn’t be used when talking about Web browsers. This year, when I agreed to do the panel again at SxSW 2008, I used the term “war” to pack the auditorium. But let’s be frank about a few things.

Things have been a bit acrimonious lately, especially when we think about the future of JavaScript. Brendan lobbed one at Chris about (and I simplify greatly) C# vs. ECMAScript in an “Open Letter.” Chris lobbed one back, claiming he was being sincere and informal and non-corporate. Then, of course, there’s the fact that Opera’s complaining about Microsoft — in court!

The point is, we still have a lot to talk about. There are still vibrant differences about where the Web is really going and people are especially interested in web access from mobile devices. I wish Apple’s PR people would let their guys participate, but we’ll have to party without them. Come to our panel at SxSW 2008! I promise you a good time.

But change is really in the offing for me, too, so all this talk of change in 2008 resonates with me on a more personal level. I resigned from AOL to do my own thing for a little while, and so far, it’s been great. Here’s what I learned about hard decisions.

You just make them.

OK, a bit too pithy, that last sentence. What I mean is, you listen to that voice inside your head, and you evaluate your opportunities, and you agonize a bit over things, and then you see the light.

That’s how it was with me. I liked working at AOL. A retrospective of my career there includes the time I spent as one of Netscape Communications’ Technology Evangelists, before we shipped viable Mozilla-based browsers. This was followed by the creation of the Mozilla Foundation in 2003 (and mass layoffs at AOL’s west coast campus, and soul searching on my part …). There was work with the Technology Strategy group, and work on Web Personalization (check out Mgnet), and W3C Standards work as AOL’s Advisory Committee Representative. Your work place kind of becomes a part of you. I mean, I was there for a whopping 6 years (and more, counting my time as a consultant for iPlanet doing work on Netscape’s Communicator 4.x series of browsers).

I’ll miss the great people I worked with. But the technical future of Web Personalization (check out Mgnet already) is in stonse’s able hands. And W3C stuff is in Kev’s able hands. And AOL will be AOL, with or without me.

So I’m going out to do some traveling, and some work on my own projects, and some searching, and some mending, and I’ll be back. Watch this space.

Now look –errare humanum est, right? Especially after a transatlantic flight, when you’re really, really tired and groggy? A sea of humans goes and stands in line behind various immigration counters, and I flow with them. I can’t really read the signs, since people are blocking the path ahead. And the lines are long.

As I near the counter, when I’m four people away from the end of the line, I notice that the sign on top of that particular counter says “EU Nationals Only.” And I glance a few lines to my right, and see a very long line of non-EU nationals, behind a counter that says “Non EU Nationals.” Whoops. I’m not an EU national — I have an Indian passport. What to do? I’m in some haste, since I don’t want to miss the connecting flight. Should I have gone to the back of the non-EU line, or waited to see what would happen at the end of the “EU Nationals Only” line? I wasn’t sure. I reasoned on the spot that the German official behind the “EU Only” line would perhaps stamp me through, but point out that I was in the wrong line. There was a chance that he would make me go to the back of the other line, but I was willing to take it.

It’s finally my turn, and I give him my passport.

“Wrong line, Mr. Gandhi” he says, and throws my passport back at me.

Umm, what?

“Gandhi?” I say stupidly?

“Yes, Mr. Gandhi. It’s zat line over zere. You go zere.”

I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

“Gandhi?” I ask again. But now, I’m stung. I’m feeling the helpless sting of racism, and it feels really bad.

“Go ZERE. To ZAT line.”

Don’t get me wrong — there are worse things than being called Mr. Gandhi. I mean, the movie won a lot of Oscars, the guy liberated a nation through non-violence, and his face is on money and stuff. But, shouldn’t an official of the German government not say things like that? Or was this all humorous, with me being a bad sport?

So I went to the back of the line, choosing to ignore the urge to grin ruefully and say “Thanks for the pointer, Mr. Sauerkraut.” Because at that very instant, I couldn’t think of a positive historical figure from Germany that was around at the same time as Gandhi was, so that’s the best I could come up with.

Firstly, buddy and fellow AOLer Kevin Lawver blogged with gusto about replacing me as AOL’s Advisory Committee Representative to the W3C. I’m going to be doing other things professionally within AOL, and Kevin, a Standards Titan at AOL, is the right guy to step up and bat for the company. I’m still going to be a member of various W3C working groups. And I got elected by the Advisory Committee to be a member of W3C’s Advisory Board, which serves an advisory role to the W3C staff. I’m honored to have been elected, and start “officially” in July. As a member of the AC, Kevin will face all the questions of the relevancy of W3C and AOL engineers making time to participate in standards that I did, and I wish him all the very best.

Secondly, the blogosphere has already been given an inkling of myAOL, a suite of web applications that I’m working on as part of a great team of AOL engineers. We’re going to launch it this summer. In particular, I’m part of the team working on Mgnet (pronounced magnet), a way to discover content through some innovative navigational metaphors. Can’t wait to go beta already!

The myAOL suite has been discussed in a “pre-release” capacity on TechCrunch and on Jeremy O.’s Web Strategist blog.

Ricardo Elias’ The 12 Labors is as watchable as its peers, and shares thematic elements with Black Orfeu. Like the 1959 “cross-over” classic, the protagonist of The 12 Labors, Heracles, is named after a character in Greco-Roman mythology. The connection to mythology here, however, is not as pronounced. As we slowly learn, the mythical 12 tasks of Heracles (which includes slaying beasts, cleaning a filthy celestial stable in a day, and other impossible errands of redemption) serves more of a symbolic role in the story of a black youth in Sao Paulo.

Heracles (a winsome Sydney Santiago) is just out of the notorious Febem reformatory (a jail for minors), and seeks employment as a “Moto Boy” in Sao Paulo under the tutelage of his cousin Jonas (Flavio Baraqui). Moto Boys are errand and delivery boys on motorcycle, typically associated with a courier company. Sao Paulo’s streets run thick with 300,000 such Moto Boys, and as they weave their way through horrendous traffic conditions, it is said that as many as 2 a day die in a road accident.

Heracles’ tasks aren’t monstrous, but are more in line with the various trials and occasional indignities suffered by the Moto Boys in general. I won’t spoil it by breaking down each task, since a comparison to mythology isn’t instructive. The Brazilian hip-hop soundtrack choreographs scenes through intense Sao Paulo traffic beautifully. Heracles is a budding artist, and has shrewd observations about the people he meets as asides in his head. There’s a particularly thrilling scene which is essentially a short movie within a movie, in which one of Heracles’ comics is brought to life in a flashback sequence.

This movie bursts with life, but is dark, with a closing scene involving a motorcycle journey to the edge of the earth, by the ocean, serving as a striking metaphor for mortality’s encounter with the infinite. As the credits rolled, the audience was pensive and introspective.

We got a chance to speak to Ricardo Elias in person after the movie, and he said something that struck me as emblematic of what this movie is about. He said that in order to rise above your circumstances when you are black and poor in Sao Paulo is to do something akin to what a demi-god like Hercules had to do in the myth. To thwart your destiny, you had to achieve the impossible, like a member of the Olympian pantheon.

The opportunity to chat with Elias in person in a five minute aside about the parallels between Brazil and India as he walked out will be one of the highlights of this year’s SFIFF for me. There’s more to be said about finding in Brazilian narratives a vicarious link with Indian realities, but I’ll leave with the sentiment that I’d like emerging Indian cinema to be inspired by what’s coming out of Brazil.

Such ruminations on what constitutes revenge and payment in kind came to mind after I left the Kabuki theater following a screening of Kore-eada’s Hana. Remember that I said I’d review it as part of my role as a member of the citizen press corps? Hana is a beautiful, slow-moving treatise on the subject of revenge and forgiveness, steeped in Japanese samurai culture, and set in a time when the samurai are pretty much extraneous. Kore-eada’s story takes place in the Edo era (old Tokyo, circa 1701) when there are no battles to be fought, and the glorious samurai of yore basically sit around unemployed as festering malcontents.

The protagonist of the movie, Soza (played by Japanese pop star Junichi Okada) is sent by his samurai clan to reside in a village in Edo to avenge his slain father. We find this out slowly, as the village where the killer supposedly resides wakes up from slumber, and each of the characters are slowly introduced.

Here we find all the evocative imagery of a rural, poor Japan, and meet all the somewhat eccentric inhabitants of the village where Soza spends his exile. There’s the scheming, crafty village elder Sadashiro, who takes Soza under his wing, claiming to have located his father’s killer. And the village simpleton, who jumps up and down with glee, often at his own facile logic. Then there’s the attractive widow Osae (Rie Miyazawa), who Soza gazes shyly at for much of the movie. The love story, like the eventual unraveling of the revenge story, moves slowly, with humor (often slapstick) and deliberation. This is not a samurai movie with dazzling swordsmanship and riveting action scenes. It is Kore-eada’s first samurai movie, and I suspect bears his imprint as an auteur.

The baby faced Soza eschews violence, is actually a pathetic swordsman for a samurai, and prefers to teach reading and writing to the women and children who attend his school. He is the classic fumbling but likable anti-hero, viewed with suspicion by the ronin who reside in the village in disguise to avenge their master (a sub plot in the story), and with outright derision by Sodesan, a dark character with an intriguing past and connection to the village (another sub plot).

Kore-eada weaves in traditional Japanese art forms and pieces of Edo history into his movie. Soza is put in the humorous situation of playing a character in a “Kabuki Revenge Play” who wants to enact revenge in front of the entire village. This irritates the restless ronin, themselves members of the historically famous “47 Ronin” who serve as a backdrop to the story of Soza. The resulting scene is one of the slapstick delights of the movie.

Despite the obvious optimism about the human spirit on parade here, the conclusion of the movie is not excessively saccharine. The actual enactment of revenge is deeply touching without bordering on the mawkish. The movie felt long (127 minutes) but I was never restless. I laughed out loud several times, and was impressed by the clever symbolism. There is one extraordinary revelation on the connection between rice cakes and manure that had my peer group chuckling well after the movie ended. The discourse is witty enough through subtitles.

Not all the subplots are elegantly brought to resolution, however, and this remains my strongest nit about a movie that I thoroughly enjoyed. The story of Sodesan, the movie’s one dark horse, is not bought to a satisfying conclusion, and I wondered what purpose his angst-ridden existence served, since he isn’t a suitable character foil to Soza. In the end, my single nit could say more about my need for catharsis and less about Kore-eada.

I’d recommend this movie. It isn’t yet available on Netflix (my service of choice), but other works in Kore-eada’s corpus are. I suspect I’m going to have another love affair with Japanese cinema, following my first one with Kurosawa.