TW Blog :: Archives for March 2004

XUL Preview In UltraEdit

Relates to Firefox and Co and XUL, IDEs

While the XUL Console discussed in the previous post is a useful tool for learning the XUL language by example with instant testing, it embeds the <window> within the XUL Console itself, so GUI display is not accurate. This can probably be overriden with JavaScript, but since I am still in the early days of XUL discovery focusing on the markup and CSS I decided to set up a Tool Configuration in UltraEdit instead, to allow XUL applications to be run straight out of the editor. First the XUL package needs to be registered in installed-chrome.txt under the Mozilla root:

content,install,url,resource:/chrome/my_xul_file/content/
locale,install,url,resource:/chrome/my_xul_file/locale/en-US/
skin,install,url,resource:/chrome/my_xul_file/skin/

For some inexplicable reason I also found I had to manually enter the skin framework into the application chrome.rdf file:

<RDF:Seq about="urn:mozilla:skin:modern/1.0:packages">
  
  [..]
  
  <RDF:li 
    resource="urn:mozilla:skin:modern/1.0:my_xul_file"/>
</RDF:Seq>

[..]

<RDF:Description about="urn:mozilla:skin:modern/1.0:findfile"
               c:baseURL="resource:/chrome/my_xul_file/skin/">
  <c:package resource="urn:mozilla:package:my_xul_file"/>
</RDF:Description>

The installed-chrome.txt file should have done this for me. Anyway, with the package registered, an UltraEdit Tool Configuration can be configured with the following command line:

"C:\Program Files\mozilla.org\Mozilla\mozilla.exe" _
  -nosplash -chrome "chrome://%n/content/%n%e"

Where _ is a line continuation. By adding the tool to the menubar, my XUL previews are just one click away. Note that if another instance of Mozilla is running at the same time, the preview will not update since it will use the chrome files from the instance that is already running. So I view the XUL Tutorial and Programmer's Reference in Firefox while I work on my XUL.
[ Micro who?! ;) ]

Posted on Sunday, Mar 07, 2004 at 20:46:32.