The Rise of Mozilla as an Application PlatformTuesday December 16th, 2003Today's main article at LinuxInsider discusses Mozilla as an application platform. The increasingly prolific Nigel McFarlane sings the praises of XUL, explains the advantages offered by Mozilla's portability and predicts that we will see many more Mozilla-based programs in the future. Thanks to koody for the news. This is a great overview. I'm sending a link to the article out to the raft of PHBs hereabout. Good article. Makes me wanna take a good look at some of the GUI's in Moz TB and FB. But when I open them in Notepad, it is very confusing. Is there a good editor for XUL? Thanx, Zeddock There are at least a couple that are started. XULmaker: http://xulmaker.mozdev.org/ and Demiurge: http://demiurge.mozdev.org/ And check out the winter theme on mozdev: http://www.mozdev.org/ and on the firebird page: http://texturizer.net/firebird/index.html Brian P I like to use the Kate editor on linux to edit my XUL files. On windows I use ultraedit or sometimes Homesite. You could also use textpad. Any of those would be a better option than notepad. You can also edit XUL and HTML files using the MozEdit extension I wrote for Mozilla/Firebird http://mozedit.mozdev.org Mozilla as a platform shows great potential. XUL still has some kinks here and there but in general it works quite well now for GUI's. There are still a bunch of annoying redraw bugs that force developers to overload flex attributes to get widgets to lay out properly. I am hoping that the GRE project gains momentum soon. I would be very cool if you could write an extension or application expecting a GRE to be available, similar to the way you can write a Java application and expect the JRE to be available if you know it is installed. This is still to up in the air though to depend on. Also, adding extensions and removing them is not done yet making it making it difficult for non-technical users to remove things. Often times after adding an updated XUL application the XUL cache needs to be manually deleted. I would like to see a little more polish go towards improving these problems so promoting Mozilla as an application would be more practical. On more of a wacky tangent, it could be an interesting project to extend XUL with desktop UI widgets so that projects like Gnome and KDE could be have custom desktops developed in XUL. It would make it much easier to modify the desktop in linux and possibly could be a standard to bring together all the different desktop models under linux. Microsoft is already moving in this direction with Longhorn and a developer can easily modify the desktop if they know their XUL-like markup language. Just a thought... > On more of a wacky tangent, it could be an interesting project to extend XUL with desktop UI > widgets so that projects like Gnome and KDE could be have custom desktops developed in XUL. You might wonna check out the XUL News Wire Story titled "KaXul and uXul: XUL for the KDE Linux Desktop Talk Slides Now Live" online @ http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.xul.announce/154 .. with Mozilla Firebird 0.7, it freezes instantly :( Yep, it hangs for me too in Firebird 0.7. Poetic in an odd way. What OS are you guys on. This page doesn't crash Firebird 0.7 on Mandrake linux or Windows ME. Mozilla 1.4 is ok in Linux too. But I'd guess that the problem may be from the page being declared XHTML 1.0 trans but it does not validate. And it's not just trivial stuff like missing alt tags. They are using nonstandard attributes on iframe and script tags. And they totally messed up this tag: <hr noshade size=1> And to top it off, dead tags too: <FONT SIZE=1 FACE="VERDANA, ARIAL, HELVETICA"> I would think that firebird would switch to quirks mode to render the page when hitting code that does not comply but the page info says it's still in standards mode. Brian P |