David Baron's Weblog

I spent the last two and a half weeks on the east coast (in the D.C. and Philadelphia metro areas), visiting family and friends. I didn't spend the whole time ignoring work, though. (And I wasn't the only one; my dad had a big (electronic) pile of final exams to read, and a journal issue to finish.)

Both because other people weren't around much (asking questions, asking for reviews, etc.) and because I was away from the distractions of the office, it was a good chance to work on some larger tasks (rather than go through blocker lists). Airplane and train rides are especially good for this (and it's not even possible to work through blocker lists without substantial preparation, since it's very hard to use Bugzilla offline)

So, in the past few weeks, I:

• Went through and fixed many of the known failures in the style system mochitests. This included a bunch of small patches and one large one (rewriting the CSS declaration serialization code to reuse the code that we use for getters for individual properties, and automatically condense shorthands).
• Fixed one blocker bug many times over. It was a case where a whole sequence of things needed to go wrong for us to crash, and I fixed most of them.
• Almost removed the almost-vestigial (but previously quite widely used) nsAreaFrame, and renamed it to nsXULLabelFrame for its one remaining consumer.
• Replaced the space manager with something much smaller (nsFloatManager) that only does what it needs to do, in preparation for fixing bug 25888.
• Fixed most of what I consider one of our worst longstanding layout bugs. It shows up pretty commonly on Wikipedia, where the bottom of a line of text overlaps the top of a floating image or figure that is wider than another floating image or figure before it. (I did this one yesterday on the airplane, and haven't even attached the patches yet.)

Now I'm back in California, and I'll be back in the office in a few hours, and should be getting back to working through smaller tasks shortly, such as the end (I hope) of the 1.9.1 blocker list.

And maybe I'll even blog more this year.