Neil's Place

We’ve been thinking a bit about the future of XULPlanet. developer.mozilla.org provides more documentation and is easier to update, both for me and for others, and also includes some of the documentation currently on XULPlanet. Due to the greater difficulty in keeping the XULPlanet version updated, this version of, for example, the tutorial, is a bit out of date.

To be honest, I haven’t updated XULPlanet documentation in quite some time, and probably won’t do much in the future. The only thing I’m likely to do is update the XPCOM reference once Firefox 3 arrives. Some developers prefer the XPCOM reference on XULPlanet instead of the MDC reference. However, the latter is created manually and is only partially complete. Perhaps someone with the time and inclination would offer to convert the XULPlanet Mozilla 1.8 XPCOM reference over to MDC. The scripts I used for this are also available.

XULPlanet at one time was quite useful, however, the time has come where its value no longer seems necessary. So at this stage, we have two options. Either find some way to make XULPlanet useful again, or remove it and have XULPlanet just redirect over to MDC.

Thoughts?

We may just have to get Half-life 2 up here in the northern office just for this. The subway renditions alone are, as Mike Beltzner would say, sooooo awesome.

The Menu and Popups Guide is now available which provides detailed documentation on the XUL menu, context menu, panel and tooltip features as well as how to use them from script. Additional improvements are much appreciated, for instance more examples or images.

In other XUL popup news, I’ve been fixing a few regressions lately, as well as fixing some other long standing popup bugs. For Mozilla 1.9, we can look forward to being able to put decks and trees in a popup panel and have them actually work. I’ve also got a fix in hand for focus navigation in popups, so one can press Tab and cycle between elements without navigating outside the popup unexpectedly. Also, focus doesn’t get confused when a popup opens or closes.