This post is directed towards anyone considering design aspects of Mozilla's layout/XPFE technology.
First of all, these are two separate technologies...
A: divide exposed features of layout (CSS?) into "programmer available" and "unavailable".
In other words divide up CSS extensions into those that XPFE programmers should be allowed to use (eg -moz-opacity) and those that they should not touch (eg the -moz-table-outer pseudo-element)?
This seems like a reasonable suggestion
B: keep the idea of a frame because its easy for learners.
"frame" as in "layout object"? I don't think the idea of a layout object is going anywhere anytime soon...
C: make some rules to ensure frames/widgets are implemented with a degree of uniformity in the DOM/XPCOM.
Frames are typically not accessible via the DOM or via XPCOM at all. They are private objects of the layout engine. The DOM nodes are accessible, and the frames may react to changes in the DOM nodes, of course.
D: provide a special frame that programmers can learn on.
Learn what on?
F: treat XPFE JS programmers as first class users of the layout engine in terms of priorities.
How are they users of the layout engine at all? That is, where do they interact directly with the layout engine?
In particular I'm speaking for non-embedded(XPFE) learner programmers, who occassionally are exposed to: frame and frame-like artifacts of the layout engine
When this happens, it's a bug -- XPFE programmers should not need to know anything about frames.
some aspects of layout are quite confusing to beginners/learners.
This will be the case no matter what design. The ugly truth is that layout is complicated (see eg the code that handles column widths in tables...)
I'm skipping the long rambling part, since you've summarized it in your 6-point list (and because so much of it is filler verbiage with no information content). If there is something in there that's not in your list that you consider important, please point it out.
Cheers, -Boris
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