I don’t remember why I eventually started looking at the mobile-browser source tree, but as I looked through browser.js, there it was:

messageManager.addMessageListener("Content:StateChange", this);

It turns out it is really easy: you can listen for Content:StateChange or Content:LocationChange, and get access to the same details you’d normally have in the WebProgressListener implementation.

As I explored the boilerplate, I opened the build script. Imagine my surprise when I read this comment at the top of the script:


#!/bin/bash
# build.sh -- builds JAR and XPI files for mozilla extensions
# by Nickolay Ponomarev
# (original version based on Nathan Yergler's build script)
# Most recent version is at <http://kb.mozillazine.org/Bash_build_script>


I have to assume this is based on the build script I developed for MozCC in 2004. I doubt anything from the original still survives (or at least I hope not), but appreciate the credit.

Summary: OpenAttribute 0.8.1 (XPI) fixes Issues 1, 2, 3, and 5. All users should install this update.

CC REL is Creative Commons’ recommended way to describe licenses and licensed works. It builds on RDFa, a W3 recommendation, and allows publishers to specify the license and other related information about a work. One of the advantages of building on RDFa was that we could scope the assertions in the page, making it unambiguous (for software) what was being licensed: the page, a particular image or video, or even a specific portion of text. While the initial release of OpenAttribute properly detected the license, it was unable to display the results.

Creative Commons licenses are self-describing using CC REL: a tool (like OpenAttribute) can dereference the license and discover information like the human readable name, version, and permissions/requirements/prohibitions. While Igor’s code from GSoC used the CC API to retrieve this information, it was clear to me that using the license itself is preferable: using self-describing resources on the web allows everyone to play, without registration or integration.

OpenAttribute 0.8 had a somewhat naive implementation of license dereferencing and parsing, which caused problems when there were multiple licensed objects in a page. In the 0.8 release, only information about the last object was displayed in the dialog. OpenAttribute 0.8.1 includes a new licenseloader component, which implements some simple serialization for these requests. If multiple requests are made, they’re queued and dereferenced/processed in order.

You’ll note that OpenAttribute isn’t available from AMO yet. That’s partially because I’d like to have some more testing before making it available there. If you try it out and find bugs or have feature requests, you can file those on the github project.

This summer, Igor Lukanin worked on a Google Summer of Code project for CC to develop a replacement for MozCC, an add-on for Firefox that would expose license and attribution information. While the project wasn’t totally successful, it did produce an add-on that detected CC licenses in pages, and exposed details about them.

Last month I had the opportunity to attend Learning, Freedom, and the Web, the first Mozilla Drumbeat Festival, in Barcelona, Spain. One of the issues identified by attendees was that, while there are plenty of works being licensed under CC licenses, knowing how to properly attribute re-use is still a challenge. How many times have we seen presentations made up of beautiful photos, with a simple “CC licensed, Flickr” under each (if that)? The proposed solution was an attribution generator: a tool that would generate reasonable attribution for CC licensed works, based on information available.

I’ve spent the past month or so hacking on Igor’s code in my spare time, using it as the basis of an attribution generator for Firefox. The result is OpenAttribute (working name, selected by the Drumbeat group), which is available for testing on Firefox 3.6 and above (I’ve been testing with 3.6 and 4.0b8 on Linux). As Dame Shirley Bassey sang, this is “all just a little bit of history repeating.”

OpenAttribute is an add-on that displays a small “CC” icon in the URL bar when license information is present. Clicking that icon displays the page’s license information and, importantly, copy and paste HTML you can use to attribute the work. You can click the “More Information” button to display the details on licensed objects in the page.

There’s still work to be done, but at this point I think it’s ready for broader testing. You can download the add-on and find the code on github. Feedback, questions, suggestions should all probably go to the attrib-generator Google Group.

So this of course demands an updated build, but I’m choosing to hold off for just a little while. See, I’ve been promising a new and improved mozCC for months. And whlie I know I won’t have time to really do much in the near future, I would like to do a few updates. See the upcoming features page in the Yiki (what’s a yiki?) for details.

* The new release, 1.1.3, adds compatibility for Firefox 1.5 Beta 2 and adds support for metadata linked in the header with a <link rel="metadata" ...> tag.
* Using the update manager you should be able automagically upgrade MozCC if you are using 1.5 Beta 2; the update specification won’t offer it to you if you’re not using Beta 2, because…
* …this release hasn’t been tested with _anything_ other than Firefox 1.5 Beta 2.
* When Firefox 1.5 is finally released, MozCC will break until we release an update. This is intentional and I’ll try to get it updated shortly after the release (barring some late breaking bug this should be a trivial update).

If you want to download the new release directly, you can find it “here”:http://drop.creativecommons.org/mozcc/releases/mozcc-1.1.3.xpi.

Actually if you tried to install it, you’d be told it’s not compatible, since mozCC 1.1.2 claims it’s only compatible with Firefox 1.4 (the internal version for Beta 1). At first I thought this was gratuitous version incrementing, and then I discovered that after incrementing the supported version in mozCC, it doesn’t work. At all. I’ve tracked down the problem and hope to have a release out later today or tomorrow that fixes both this compatibility issue as well as a rather embarassing issue pointed out by Jeff yesterday. Stay tuned.

*UPDATE*: Just to be clear, it’s not really _gratuitious_ per say to increment the version from 1.4 to 1.4.1 — I just assumed it had gone to 1.5; mea culpa. Also, the update is “now available”:http://yergler.net/blog/archives/2005/10/09/mozcc-113-for-firefox-15-beta-2.