News

Jesse will be visiting 10-21 August 2005.

On March 28th, Greasemonkey broke the javascript security model, allowing "userscripts" to connect to sites other than the originating sites. This lead me to develop Book Burro, a helper that discretely displays bookseller prices on the current page. Book Burro is a great example of what "Web 2.0" can be about. Greasemonkey is currently at 0.5 (resolving some huge security holes that our adventure on the 28th created).

My current work is about "Monkey 2.0", which is about lowering the bar for using these scripts. The first phase (Monkey 1.0) is a repository Userscripts.org (formerly greasemonkeyed.com). Issues to be addressed include trust, maintenance, and collaboration.

• Trust - Since userscripts operate outside of the security model, a malicious userscript could send every keystroke to the bad guys. A combination of peer review, and automated testing will be used to help secure end users.

• Maintenance - when a web sites change breaking a script, waiting for the original author to correct the script may not be the best solution. Enabling users to patch scripts (combined with trust above) will help keep cruft from occurring.

• Collaboration - many scripts are "open source" (gpl/bsd/mit license), but an easy way to collaborate on developmnet does not exist.

This builds a solid foundation for "Monkey 2.0", which takes the idea of userscripts, but instead of modifying webpages, the goal is to produce atoms of information from webpages. With the end goal of drag&drop use of atoms, scripts, and web services by end users (picture apple automator-ish interface)