Posts

Looks like I am headed to CHI 2007 to participate in a session on user interface description languages. The session will explore the use of markup language UI’s (such as XUL, XAML and Flex) in prototyping user interfaces before handing them off for system integration. This could allow the interaction designer/engineer to become a more integral part of the iterations in the development cycle.

Developer days are informal day-long gatherings of Mozilla developers. We’ll be hosting one in Mountain View (Mar 25) and one in Boston (Mar 30). These are mainly oriented to active Mozilla platform, application and extension developers. The agenda is fairly loose and open. It’s a chance for people to talk about what they were working on, get help with problems, hack on code, and discuss where the platform is going, or could be going.

Firefox 3’s offline capabilities have been getting some attention lately: Chris Double’s post on porting Zimbra to use offline shows-off the potential. Robert O’Callahan and John Resig give details on the different pieces of the capabilities, namely: Offline Cache, Offline Events and DOMStorage.

In December, Robert O’Callahan had a post about the large amount of XUL-based development happening without much visibility. Mozilla wants to find out as much as possible about such development. At Solutions Linux 2007, there was a Mozilla/XUL Round Table session to examine the potential of the Mozilla platform through success stories. From what I have seen (mostly in French) it was quite a successful session. Some of the demos and stories included:

FUEL is the little library that John Resig and I are working on which should make developing extensions a little easier. It’s been a while since we last talked about it so I thought an update was in order.

I put together a simple XUL validator based on the ideas in my last post. There is a primitive front end where you can put XUL into a textarea and validate it. The validator is completely client-side JavaScript with a simple JSON rules file. You can view the source and the rules from the validator “Tests” page.

A validator for XUL could be a good idea. I am thinking about something more than just ‘schema’ validation. Something to help with best practices and accessibility. Maybe ‘validator’ isn’t the right word. Here are some checks that could be useful: