Updated 2006-11-12 11:35:02 by lwv ▲

An open-source version of the 4.0 Netscape browser, developed for a long time by a large team of developers and subsequently re-utilized as Netscape 6 and 7 (version 5 never existed for various reasons). Homepage at [1]

What is the status of the new Tcl plugin regarding Mozilla?

AK: According to Jeff Hobbs it will work with Mozilla.

escargo 17 Dec 2003 - I was reading Linux news, and came across a mention of this article in LinuxInsider: "From Browser to Platform: Mozilla Rises" [2].

It seems to me that many of the attributes that are ascribed to Mozilla (portability, use of standards, included scripting language) could be duplicated with Tcl as a base (maybe even using starkits as a base). I have sometimes wondered if [XUL] could be used to specify Tcl GUIs.

LES - I can't get too enthusiastic about [XUL]. It is awkward and jerky under Windows. The first time I ran Komodo, I frowned immediately and thought: "They made it with Mozilla??? Why not Tcl/Tk?"

[XUL] looks better under Linux, but it's just because all things graphical look awkward and jerky under Linux, so it just blends in with the rest and looks acceptable.

escargo - How much of the jerk is due to Windows or resources on the system where you tried it? I think that Mozilla is an example implementation of [XUL], but not necessarily the only possible one. (Kind of like Java and Sun's JVM.) I have sometimes wished that the GUI Building Tools could use a language like XUL as a storage format. As it stands now, different tools have different storage formats and therefore you cannot freely interchange them. That's where something like XUL could be very valuable. Using something like XUL, where you need to incorporate XML processing to get some other job done, is a burden, but its costs might be worth the investment.

Maybe the ActiveState people can comment about developing applications like Komodo in XUL, and how they might do something similar in Tcl. I can imagine that with a development platform and a starkit that could update itself, that Tcl could create something similar.

escargo 18 Dec 2003 - This is getting further away from Mozilla, but I found three additional efforts at abstract definition of user interfaces:

  • GITK - Generalized Interface Toolkit[3]
  • UIML - User Interface Markup Language[4]
  • XIML - eXtensible Interface Markup Language[5]

Some of these are sufficiently abstract that they could have implementations in Tcl. Certainly, it should be possible to see if they can specify user interfaces that cannot be implemented in Tcl (which would indicate where Tcl might need new widgets, etc.).

Scott Gamon - Two more recent MLs for UI:

  • XAML - Microsoft's forthcoming layout language[6]
  • FLEX - Macromedia's forthcoming layout language[7]

FLEX is closer to XUL. XAML has a lot more noise.

Mozilla Sidebar for Tk bug references.

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