Slashdot Mirror
Patch Maker -- Mozilla Hacking & Patching Made
A reader writes: " Mozillaquest.com has an article about Patch Maker which is a new Perl script that let's you hack the Mozilla UI using JS, CSS, and XUL. You do not have to download or compile the source code or pull CVS. It makes writing and submitting Mozilla UI patches easier."
Stop posting stuff from mozillaquest.com!
Even if the stuff about scripting is true, mozillaquest exists solely to bash the efforts of those who spend their time working on the mozilla project. Don't vindicate that troll who runs it.
Now, even though in the article Mike says that the reason for this "toy" is to help fix the bugs that are "raging out of control", at least he makes the article respectible, and professional.
Mike is a very experienced writer who will undoubtedly move on to higher journalism, like maybe ZDNet. Heck, ZDNet might even turn MozillaQuest into a full-blown print magazine.
Just remember folks, in a couple years, Mike Angelo will have gone places you have never dreamed. Even though people call the stuff he writes now "crap", I believe in him.
Every time there's a story linked to MozillaQuest.com, somebody links to MozillaQuestQuest.com. So now I am. Why does Slashdot continue linking to this retard?
I am the author of Patch Maker. Any questions about it may be directed to me :-)
Gerv
The impetus for creating Patch Maker seems to lie in the fact that Mozilla bugs are raging out of control.
In fact, the impetus for creating Patch Maker was to allow more people to contribute to Mozilla. Many UI designers are not able to manage the intricacies of our build process; many people do not want to purchase Code Warrior (on Mac) or MSVC++ 6 (on Windows) and are unable, for one reason or another, to install Linux. Many people do not have the bandwidth to continually download and update the CVS tree - even downloading a nightly is a major event which must happen at cheap telephone times.
This software is for all of these people. For the first time, you can make a significant code contribution to a large open source project without the complexities of compiling.
Note: Patch Maker is still in development; I would appreciate help porting it to Mac especially, and debugging it on Windows.
Gerv
--
gerv@mozilla.org, author of Patch Maker
Did you read any other comments? Take everything you read at MozillaQuest with a very large pinch of salt.
XUL is an XML-based language - just like XHTML, SVG or any of the others. The sentence "A standard XML parser cannot interpret XUL." is either wrong or extremely misleading. No XML parsers can _interpret_ what they read, but an XML parser can parse XUL perfectly. Mozilla uses expat for this purpose.
That is why you cannot display XUL as a Web page with Internet Explorer 5, Netscape 4.x, or other non-Mozilla-based browsers.
"Displaying XML as a web page" makes no sense. What happens is that you apply a style sheet to some XML (whether XHTML or something else) to display it. If you gave XUL a style sheet, it would display according to that style sheet. Essentially, this is what Mozilla does when it renders its UI.
Gerv