XUL Explorer 0.2

December 21, 2006

I received a lot of feedback on XUL Explorer. It’s been a great learning experience for me as well. Here is a list of changes:

Preview tab has been removed. The preview pane now appears below the editor pane. Previewing in a popup window is still available.
Option to automatically update the preview as the editor changes. (Thanks to Richard Klein)
Indicator in the statusbar shows errors. Double-click to display Error Console.
Option to specify the snippet used to load the editor on startup.
Option to include a user snippet file. The snippets are merged with the builtin snippets at startup.
File > New allows user to pick any “Template” snippet, as well as blank.
Simple XUL Checker can be used to ‘validate’ the XUL snippet. This is fairly basic for now: It checks for legal element and attribute names, including allowed attributes for a given element.
More than a few bug fixes

Here are some things I am considering for the future:

Support attribute value checking where appropiate (boolean and enumerated values) - XUL Checker
Support “best practice” checks such as: using of commands and keys, strings in DTDs and so on - XUL Checker
Multi file support (probably use a tab for each file/editor).
Venkman support
Support extension creation - perhaps by using Test mode

Keep the feedback coming!