Lj�s�lfr wrote:
As it stands, XUL has security issues which seem to be the inverse of the standard browser's restrictions.
You lost me here...
I'm no XUL-meister, but as I understand things, XUL installs as part of the Browser, and has basically the same OS access as any other part of the browser. This is exactly what web pages are not supposed to have. OTOH, you can't put a URL (AFAIK) directly into XUL. IIRC, you can't even run JavaScript except for what is directly added to the onload attribute of the window. There are ways around this such as turning off security, or using signed code. This is rarely what we want in web space. For in-house applications, signed code makes sense, but I don't want Microsoft executing signed (and therefore 'trusted') code from their site on my system.
There are many circumstances where the XUL approach to UI makes a lot of sense for the web, but, due to the security restrictions, that is not currently a viable option. There are ways to kludge XUL into an HTML page, but I tend to avoid such hoop-jumping. Perhaps I'm over estimating the effort of doing this. I haven't attempted the things suggested on this page:
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/mozilla/2002/12/17/app_dev.html
"In addition to serving XUL files themselves, you can also insert fragments of XUL into HTML files. This could be useful, for example when providing XUL-based navigation for an HTML Web site. To use XUL this way, you must define it in an XBL file and then use CSS to bind the XBL file to the HTML file, thus inserting the XUL into the HTML document's DOM.
"Here's an example of XUL in HTML, an experimental version of the mozilla.org home page with a new XUL-based navigation bar instead of the existing HTML-based sidebar.
"mozilla.org website w/XUL navigation bar
"Note that you can't bind the XBL to an arbitrary element like you can with XBL in XUL. You must bind it to a regular HTML element like a SPAN or a DIV. The code that binds the XBL is as simple as the following line from that experimental home page:
"<div style="-moz-binding: url('menu.xml#menu');"></div>
"You should also be able to insert XUL directly into XHTML files, but a bug in Mozilla currently prevents this from working. See the bug report for the details."
