<Glazblog/>

Webchunks (the Firefox add-on) lets you select an arbitrary element in a web page to turn it into a webchunk. Nothing magical here. A Webslice is, per Microsoft's "spec", an element carrying an ID and the class slice. In other terms, an element selected by the selector #thatID.slice. Webchunks just extends that notion to be able to use here any CSS selector, not only that one.

But selecting an arbitrary element can lead to unexpected results. Let's take a concrete example :

• the web page liberation.fr has a block of recent news on the right hand side ("Dernières Dépêches")
• that block can be selected using the selector #e1b3-1
• but the contents of that block are not available at load time but rather ajax-based...
• so comparing a cached version of that element and a recently downloaded version is meaningless if you don't let all JavaScript code in the page run and compare them only afterwards...

I am then unable to say liberation.fr updated its Last News section just loading the source of that HTML page... Painful.

Conclusion : I miss here something standard (an attribute, a class, whatever and I don't care) in the DOM to let me know the contents of that element are retrieved over the wire after page load. I also miss a standard event allowing me to know the contents are now loaded and that the "final" content of the element can now be observed.

Two famous demo sites for Webslices/Webchunks are Digg and the webslices-enabled page at Stumbleupon. Unfortunately, both of them use Webslices/Webchunks almost badly since their slices contain a number of diggs or a number of reviews attached to the link they present. It means that even if the "useful" content does not change, the slice can be shown as "updated" in the browser only because the numbers changed... I understand they want to show these numbers but from a user's perspective, that's counter-productive.

One thing we really missed in XUL was the ability to capture the mouse movements on the whole screen. Neil Deakin worked on that and introduced setCapture() and releaseCapture() on elements. He also worked on enabling the resizer element to work correctly in popups and panels but it's buggy at this time so I used setCapture/releaseCapture for the new version of Webchunks to enable resizable popups:

I'm only discovering today that the Webslices spec was updated on MSDN, and new types of Webslices were added to the spec. In particular a webslice can now be a standalone remote URL. That explains why some Webslices, for example the ones living inside www.nyt.com, don't work well with the Webchunks extension. I'm working on it. I think I'll revamp entirely my extension to make it more modular, allow a toolbar button showing/hiding the webchunks toolbar. Stay tuned.

• my Webchunks extension was not working at all on my Mac with Shiretoko and I really wondered why. I did not have enough time to investigate until now. I just found why : the pinstripe (Mac) theme for Shiretoko adds a new binding to toolbars that extends the normal toolbar binding. Hmmmm nowindowdrag attribute Anyway, since my toolbar binding for Webchunks was extending toolbar.xml#toolbar, it did not work at all with Shiretoko on mac. Unfortunately my only option at this time is to make my toolbar nowindowdrag="true"... I just fixed that and will improve a bit my code before making a new public release on addons.mozilla.org.
• Laurent Jouanneau finally made it and it's excellent news for all of us who want to rely on a good HTML, XHTML and XML serializer : bug 422403 is now fixed !!! BlueGriffon is of course going to rely on it. Much better pretty printing, no more crazy blank lines. Thanks a lot Laurent !

Now working on BlueGriffon after Nvu, there are a lot of things I can implement in BlueGriffon I could not achieve with Nvu. The reason is the maturity of the Mozilla platform. Let me list the plusses I just could not live without any more:

• xulrunner ; I said it many times in the past but let me repeat it one more time : xulrunner is a true cornerstorne in the Mozilla ecosystem.
• CSS 3 selectors ; that's surprising but the :nth-child() selectors and friends I introduced in the first Selectors draft so long ago are so powerful they allow a wide range of new features.
• DOM 3 getUserData/setUserData ; the possibility to add data to the DOM without hurting the serialization is a major thing for me.
• Storage and sqlite-based templates ; it's wonderful and probably deserves a FUEL-like library to simplify sqlite databases' manipulation. And Laurent told me today I could even write my own template system based on whatever component I want. Just lovely !
• XBL ; Laurent and I recently discovered that we don't need any more to call this.parentNode.parentNode.... to call a method on the bound element from an anonymous descendant. XBL bindings are much simpler and maintainance/changes are simpler since we can move anonymous nodes in the <content> element without having to care about the context. That's a great plus.
• the style and override manifest instructions ; they are so powerful for such a simplicity they allow beautiful things.
• JavaScript's speed ; to give a very concrete example, Nvu had c++ code to gather the list of classes and IDs used in the selectors of all stylesheets attached to a given document. At the time I implemented it in c++, I dropped a JS implementation because it was just too slow to be usable. BlueGriffon has the same feature, now implemented only in JS, and the speed difference with the c++ implem in Nvu (gecko 1.7) is negligible. Wow, to say the least...
• canvas ; do I need to explain ?
• HTML5 drag and drop, deliciously simple to manage.

The things I still miss:

• dependant windows ; I'd love to be able to open a window from another one and have both of them moved or inconified/raised together.
• a library of transitions à-la-jQuery in XUL to make smoothly appear dialog areas or smoothly resize dialogs, slide deck contents.
• a HTML parser ; that's amazing the number of ugly things Myk and I had to write for microformats or webchunks just because we don't have a HTML parser... The current need to use a hidden (or visible if you're lucky) iframe is painful.
• since JavaScript now reaches the speed magnitude of native code, I'd love to see CSS Selectors' extensiblity. I want to be able to define my own boolean pseudo-classes without having to hack SelectorMatches(). It's not purely theoretical, I would use that immediately.
• a more powerful CSS Object Model storing not only CSS rules recognized by Gecko but also unknown rules and comments. This is a very tough issue, hard to solve. But a web editor will always suffer if the user loses the comments or the non-standard rules he/she inserts in stylesheets..
• CSS Media Queries... Having in the same web editor the ability to edit a document for normal, medium and small screens is a real plus and CSS MQ are the technology I need here.

Things I have not used yet but I will definitely use them in the near future:

• JavaScript code modules (JSMs)

And the things I still dislike and want to see dumped:

• XSLT ; yeah yeah XSLT is powerful but it's also an awfully complex solution when you want to deal with simple transformations.
• RDF ; a proof of existence of the devil.

I guess the title says it all. Firefox will show a short help page after extension's installation. Feedback welcome!

MozillaLinks

Thanks to an important code contribution by Zbigniew Braniecki (aka Gandalf), I am now in the process of adding Webchunks visual addition to any web site. When I say "visual", I mean that you will not have to write a Greasemonkey script to add a webchunk to your web site of choice, you won't need to know the Webslices spec or understand XPath-proof-of-existence-of-the-devil. Your mouse and a click will be enough. And if I have enough time for that, you won't even need Greasemonkey. Stay tuned...

Julio Ernesto Lopez, webmaster of www.criticadigital.com, sent me yesterday a very interesting bug report about webchunks. It's very interesting because it's two bugs in one really, one for my Webchunks extension and one for IE8's implementation of Webslices. On my side, I was incorrectly disabling JavaScript in weslices in some cases and that led to problems with sites populating data from Ajax queries. It took me a few hours yesterday to correctly narrow the bug and find a fix. On IE8's side, I noticed a very visible difference between Webslices' "specification" and IE8's behaviour. I have pinged Microsoft about that. I'll tell you more when I have their reply.

So expect a new version of Webchunks to hit addons.mozilla.org in the coming days (addon review needed, it's not a trusted extension yet).

The french web site Le Journal du Net has a story about Firefox 3 that contains "feedback" from users. I am putting "feedback" between quotes because some of the feedback seems to me highly questionable. Anyway, since it's in french, and since it's useful input anyway, you'll find a summary of the article in english below. Warning, it's really a summary, I did not test, I have no opinion myself, I am just quoting the article :

Pros

• cleaner UI
• faster engine
• awesome bar
• non modal passwd manager
• spell checker
• better tab management
• less crashes, better stability
• "the best browser, IE is dead"

Cons

• not a lot of visible changes
• some useless changes
• download manager's UI
• some sites don't work correctly with FF 3
  • Hotmail shows the "classic" interface and not the new one
• too many extensions not ready for FF3
• some sites are detected as "malware sites" even if they're not
  • Support to Ingrid Betancourt's web site
• some sites give a 500 error with FF3 and work with FF2
  • http://www.assedic.fr/ (the authenticated part of the site, I did not test it)
• FF3 chokes on some images in a web page while FF2 works correctly
• often crashes with Flash
• copy/paste often broken (uuuh ?!!?)
• page scrolling sometimes not smooth

Back to my own personal experience with Firefox 3 on WinXP,there are only two things that annoy me (only a very little bit) from time to time, but I could not investigate yet so I did not file a bug :

1. from time to time, the caret is visible in the page and that harms scrolling using arrow keys ; I have no idea if this is related to an extension or not, but I don't think so since I have no extension playing with designMode or contentEditable and I have only the following extensions running: AdBlock+, DOMI, Glazoom, Greasemonkey, HTML Validator, Venkman, SQLite Manager, Webchunks.
2. from time to time, in particular when I close a window containing multiple tabs and one of these tabs has flash content or a video running , Firefox 3 remains in memory and eats up to 90% cpu.