Tag: Mozilla

Why choice in software matters … a story from the real world


Ten years ago today something happened that has had a significant impact on many millions of people across the world … Mozilla 1.0 was released.

Image representing Mozilla as depicted in Crun...
Image via CrunchBase

Above all else Mozilla, and it’s leaner, fitter, offspring, Mozilla Firefox, is the most important piece of free (as in freedom) software ever produced. For sure, it stood on the shoulders of giants to get there, but by giving the world a real choice in browsers the Mozilla Foundation changed the rules for the Internet, forced Microsoft to get its act together and crushed that company’s attempts to bind us all into a proprietary software future (remember ActiveX anyone?) online.

It is probably going too far to say that without Mozilla there would be no Arab Spring, for instance, but maybe not by much. Because Mozilla and Firefox also taught the public that there were alternatives out there and so the future did not have to be about what ever Baby Blue said it was. And that willingness to experiment online is helping power the mass adoption of smart phones, which are the weapons of choice for online revolutionaries.

It is easy to forget how bad it had got before Mozilla came along … Internet Explorer was a truly atrocious application that was not updated for several years. Microsoft had no interest in open standards because it had no competition. Mozilla changed all that. Not instantly, but the pressure began immediately.

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Dealing with 0x80600001 errors


Maybe you have just seen a message like this:

Error: uncaught exception: [Exception… “Component returned failure code: 0x80600001 [nsIXSLTProcessor.importStylesheet]”  nsresult: “0x80600001 (<unknown>)”  location: “JS frame :: file:///home/adrian/webtech/cia.html :: fulltable :: line 47”  data: no]

If you have then chances are you are working on some XSL/XSLT (the above comes from a piece of coursework I am working on which manipulates an XML representation of data from the CIA World Fact Book).

The error indicates that your XSL is broken and non-compliant and the problem is that Firefox/Mozilla is much stricter about what is broken than it is likely your command line XSLT processor is: the piece of XSL which generated the above message seemed to fly through xsltproc on my Linux box.

The best way to fix this is to take out the lines, one by one, from your XSL and look for the one that breaks the transformation. To avoid being inadvertently tied up in some issue of plagiarism later on I cannot post the XSL I was working on when this came up, but I had a line like this:

<xsl:apply-templates match="//item"/>

That is bad XSL – the match should be a select but as xsltproc happily covered up for my mistake and generated the XHTML I was looking for I could not understand why Firefox was flagging the error on this line of Javascript xsltproc.importStylesheet(xmlxsl).

It also took me a while to find an online explanation, so I wrote this.