"Siegfried Heintze" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
news:<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>...
> I've been poking around http://www.mozilla.org/newlayout/xml/ and all I can
> find is specifications. Does not there have to be some special features like
> IE data islands?
>
> Where can I find documentation to explain code like
> "document.getElementById('main').style.backgroundColor =
> (cb.checked?'white':'black');"?
>
> Thanks,
> Siegfried
Yeah, this is a major problem for anyone wanting to evaluate Mozilla.
Its easy enough to fire it up as a browser then you think, ok, lets
test out how the scripting support works and maybe have a play with
vector graphics etc.
But there's no coherent documentation - just tons of specs and
roadmaps and things only Mozilla's own developers could love.
If you go onto MSDN, you've got reasonably coherent documentation on
Microsoft's DOM and how to interact with it in script and by using
HTML. If this material exists for Mozilla I haven't found it.
There are isolated tutorials and things but no coherently structured
reference material, at least AFAIK.
Can anyone point me to some actually useful documentation that works
at the level Siegfried wants, because that's what everyone else who
isn't directly involved with Mozilla wants too. It's no good saying
his example covers a lot of different functional areas in Mozilla.
That's a Mozilla developer-centric view of the product. Users (i.e
those who want to use Mozilla to build solutions) don't want to look
in umpteen separate specs to work out what's syntactically legal.
If the documentation doesn't actually exist, I have to say that until
it does, Mozilla is not going to attract anything like the number of
developers it would if there was good documentation for it, so
perhaps, now we are at 0.9.3, some of the Mozilla team might like to
contemplate this. I know writing keen code is fun but if no-one knows
how to use it, what's the point?.
In particular we need a 'compare and contrast' document that
highlights
(a) The differences in the DOM between Internet Explorer and Mozilla.
(The W3C stuff is just plain unreadable, sorry)
(b) The differences in Javascript scripting (e.g event declaration)
between IE and Mozilla
(c) The Mozilla analogies to IE's behaviours (if there are any - I
know you've got XUL but how do you build UI objects in Javascript like
you can with IE behaviours)
(d) Mozilla SVG contrasted with IE's VML.
(e) and LOTS of examples that actually WORK in the latest version of
Mozilla, please.
I know the Mozilla gurus will perhaps sneer at this - they'll say, all
the information is available, read this, and this and this and......
but the issue is one of TIME... I want very much to get familiar with
Mozilla but I don't want to fight my way through opaque layers of
specifications and BNF grammars to get there. I don't have to do this
with IE because MS documented it reasonably well - is it too much to
ask the same of Mozilla.
