Firefox

Hacks 58-74 This chapter describes how to jump up and down on Firefox using XML content. Sometimes that content starts out with an HTML page, and sometimes it doesn't. You have the option of a pure XML environment or an HTML-driven one. One ...

Here's how to pick between them. This hack explains how to specify a display contract between a web page and Firefox. A display contract is an agreement between the content author and Firefox that guarantees that the content will be displayed a...

XML content is interpreted rather than compiled by Firefox. If XML is interpreted by a nonvalidating parser, only basic syntax errors are reported. This hack shows how to check your XML content more thoroughly. There is no DTD or XML sch...

The W3C (http://www.w3.org) XML Namespaces specification allows document syntax from several different types of XML documents to exist in one file. Firefox's Gecko rendering engine can display some documents that are of mixed type, but not all. ...

Before MathML there was TEX (pronounced "Tek"), a typesetting system developed prior to the Web by Donald Knuth in the 70s and 80s. TEX has set the standard for professional-looking math on digital devices, especially for print media. TEX and a...

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is a W3C XML standard for defining two-dimensional images that are composed of vector graphics. SVG is useful for maps, illustrations, diagrams, and numerous other uses. SVG support is being added to Firefox and Mo...

XPath defines a syntax for selecting parts of an XML document. It consists of syntax to select direct elements and their attributes, as well as a set of standard functions. XPath was released as a W3C recommendation in 1999 and is such a major el...

As someone who is obviously interested in the Web and all it has to offer, you might have heard about wonderful technologies such as XML (eXtensible Markup Language, http://www.w3.org/XML/) and XSL (eXtensible Stylesheet Language, http://www.w3....

Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) is a way for you to run methods (effectively function calls) on a remote server. Commands are formatted as XML documents on the client and sent to the server, which processes the commands and returns an XML-fo...

XML-RPC is a way for you to run methods on a server from a remote client. All commands and responses are formatted as XML. It's similar to SOAP [Hack #65], and both are intended to solve the same sorts of problems. However, XML-RPC is a much si...

When scripting a web service with SOAP [Hack #65], you create a proxy object in the browser to represent the object or service you're controlling on the server. Other scripts in the browser can use that proxy as if it were the actual server reso...

Many books have been written on the craft of making web pages with HTML, and this hack won't cover that broad category. Crafting whole XUL applications (or extensions, which are application pieces) is a similar process. XUL can run standalone ...

The HTML and XHTML standards allow a content author to extend the set of composition elements on a web page by applying special styles to the <div> and <span> tags and their content. A styled <div> block might appear to be a nav...

The W3C's Resource Description Framework (RDF) standard is one of the more complex XML standards. RDF is an application of XML, but it makes little use of the XML tag hierarchy. Instead, it turns any specified tags into facts. Facts are stored i...

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is a collection of XML-based file formats. RSS support in Firefox is in flux at the time of writing, and that heavily affects the ease with which you can get anything done. This hack provides some jumping-off point...

One of the most powerful uses of the Mozilla technologies is when they are combined with other web technologies to produce a complete client/server solution. This hack combines Mozilla's XML interface language XUL with RDF, PHP, and a MySQL databa...

Here's how to do so using PHP libraries. We have already seen a number of ways to create XUL content for Mozilla [Hack #72] . The first and the simplest is just manually written, static XML. The second is to use XUL templates and XML-RDF to ...

The JavaScript language is officially named ECMAScript. E4X (ECMAScript for XML) is the new ECMA-357 standard (at http://www.ecma-international.org) that extends Edition 3 of ECMAScript. It adds a drop of extra syntax that makes it easy to manip...