September 2002
Intermediate to advanced
480 pages
11h 38m
English
book
Creating Applications with Mozilla
by David Boswell, Brian King, Ian Oeschger, Pete Collins, Eric Murphy
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Chapter 7. Extending the UI with XBL
You now know that XUL is the basic tool set for creating your application interface, but even it has limitations. It is just a finite set of widgets that your programming needs may transcend. If you find that you reimplement many of the same groups of widgets in different applications, or if you want to extend your application's interface in some other way, you will find the eXtensible Binding Language (XBL) an invaluable tool.
This chapter describes what XBL is and how it is used. Basically, XBL provides a way to attach new content or behavior to your application by using XBL bindings. XBL can extend, add to, and reorganize user interfaces. XBL can also help you organize scattered XUL code into a set of self-contained widgets that make building and maintaining your Mozilla application much easier. Appendix C provides a reference for the XBL element set, with which new elements can be created.
7.1. What Is XBL?
XBL is an XML markup language invented specifically for creating widgets. XBL looks similar to XUL, and may even contain XUL or HTML and other markup (see the Section 7.1.3 section later in this chapter for more information about how other markup is used in XBL bindings), but its purpose is different. Flexibility and interoperability are the point of XBL.
If the XUL textbox is inadequate, for example, you can use XBL to create and attach a new widget called <datafield/>, possibly based on textbox, that provides special attributes and ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.