PUBLIC MARKS from amyrussell with tag mozilla

I love browsing Lambda the Ultimate, the "programming languages weblog," because it makes me feel stupid. There's nothing quite as educational for an undergraduate as hanging out with some grad students and finding out just how much he's still got to learn about his chosen discipline. That's how I feel when I read Lambda. I might not "get" everything, but I always come away with a bunch of stuff to look up and explore.

It's always interesting when the wider tech media picks up on a turf war that would otherwise be visible only to its participants, their peers and the followers of obscure programming blogs. Ars Technica and Slashdot are now reporting on ECMAScript 4/JavaScript 2 dust-up that's been big news on Ajaxian all month. These fairly insidery sites aren't losing too many of the story's nuances. But several more generalized IT publications have picked up a story from IDG News Service's Chris Kanaracus that reduces it to a "Mozilla vs. Microsoft" thing. Even Slashdot and Ars Technica can't resist the easy headline:

Songbird, the open-source, Mozilla-based media player, received its 0.3 "developer pre-release" on Oct. 30. The UI hasn't changed much since the 0.2.5 "developer preview," but things continue to evolve under the hood. Better yet, the documentation and demos keep getting better. Check out the developer center for information about using XUL to build add-ons or using the JavaScript API to integrate your webapp with Songbird's media player.