Re:No XBL Components Left in Firefox
by kevingadd on Saturday October 26, 2019 @06:59PM
(#21366810)
"HTML5" + things like css grid and flexbox that you need to build UI in a sensible manner are pretty new inventions. XUL predates them dramatically, building UI in HTML at the time would have been an absolute nightmare. I know because I had to ship it in multiple applications
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Re:No XBL Components Left in Firefox
by The_rationalist on Saturday October 26, 2019 @08:01PM
(#21367092)
I understand that it probably was a better technology at the time.
But are there any concepts/technologies in XUL that would be useful to add in the HTML standard?
Re:No XBL Components Left in Firefox
by xeeeeeeeeeeenu on Saturday October 26, 2019 @08:26PM
(#21367157)
It's a minor problem, but CSS, unlike XUL, doesn't provide a way to crop text in the middle[1][2].
[1] - https://www.w3.org/wiki/Text-overflow_middle_cropping
[2] - https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/Mozilla/XUL...
Cropping text in the middle is extremely hard to spec and implement for general inline CSS. Cropping at the start or end can be implemented as a purely paint-time operation. Cropping in the middle means you have to change the layout, and you have to define the layout of the stuff in the middle that has been cropped away in case someone does element.getClientRects() etc. It is far from obvious how that should work.
XUL texboxes avoided this problem by only supporting a single plain text string, but applying that constraint to HTML+CSS would be incredibly ugly (and people soon be complaining about that constraint, anyway).