discussion of the Creative Commons Metadata work

["Nathan R. Yergler" <nathan AT yergler.net>]

After an interminable delay and over 60 days since the last preview, 
mozCC 0.8.0 is now available. This release represents a major upgrade to 
the previous codebase, and will hopefully form the basis for the 1.0 
release. Features include:

   * Support for localization. While mozCC still only support English,
     this opens the door for the addition of new translations. If
     you’re interested in translating mozCC, please contact me.
   * Better RDF extraction: mozCC now supports metadata specified as
     |<a rel="license" ...>|.
   * Performance improvements: mozCC parses and retrieves metadata only
     once, and allows the browser to continue rendering during
     retrieval of |<link>|'d metadata.
   * New, improved details UI. License and work metadata is shown as
     human-readable strings, as opposed to a semi-mangled tree
     representation.
   * Support for the new extension manager in Firefox 0.9.

Installation instructions are available at 
http://yergler.net/projects/mozcc/install . Note that CVS is currently 
down at MozDev, so you should only install from yergler.net until that 
comes back up and the download network is updated. I’ll post a notice 
here when that happens.

If you are upgrading from a previous version of mozCC, it is *strongly* 
recommended that you uninstall and restart your browser before 
installing 0.8.0. Changes to the internal layout of mozCC have made 
upgrades, well, dicey. For that reason, I’m not enabling the “upgrade” 
button that appears in the preferences. Sorry, but I can’t find a way to 
make upgrades work consistently well. If you have any questions about 
this, feel free to contact me directly (nathan AT yergler.net).

While this is a major step forward for mozCC, there are a few known issues:

   * When customizing the toolbar under Mozilla Firefox, the toolbar
     button looks, well, weird. Screwed up, you may say. Yes, I know.
   * The icon size is a little off in Firefox.

I anticipate an 0.8.1 release within a week or so to correct these and 
other bugs. If you find any additional issues, please contact me 
(nathan AT yergler.net; good) or file a bug 
(http://mozcc.mozdev.org/bugs.html ; better). As always, suggestions, 
criticism and ideas are welcome.

Thanks,

Nathan R. Yergler