Excellent post, with deep rich thoughts and citations, thank you for taking the time to write it all up! Especially your summaries and comparisons of points not explicitly stated in the links, they're gold. It rings true with what I learned working on TomTom Home based on xulrunner, and looking into the python/PyGTK/xulrunner/javascript integration stuff for the OLPC, used by the "Browse" activity.
Thanks, Don. I consider this high praise. I suppose I was unintentionally channelling your style. Just trying to provide synthesis and direct attention at some nuance that usually doesn't show up when this topic gets perennially brought to the fore.
Messy as my piece above is, hopefully there's enough there and/or it's received at a deep enough level for a sufficient number of folks that it doesn't smolder out. There's a flame here that I'd like to see kept alive and hopefully renewed, ideally at a frequency matching how often these discussions periodically reappear, or at a minimum some fraction of that—at least until we've arrived in utopia.
>The View Source button fn-space and some alternative key combinations in particular activities allow one to look behind the activity, peeling away layers of abstraction in order to reveal the underlying codebase which makes it tick. This feature will integrate cleanly with the Develop activity, encouraging children to view, modify, and redistribute variations on the activities they use. Through collaboration and sharing, a garden of home grown activities will begin to develop on the laptops, created by the children themselves.
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Browse