I have the ability to be brief somewhere; let me see where I've put it ... oh yes, hidden under the expositional style
Brevity makes for clarity, in most cases...
All I said originally was, gee, A-F are potential improvements to this broad area of Mozilla for learners, and please don't take
I am going to post back your original A-F, with comments...
A: divide exposed features of layout (CSS?) into "programmer available" and "unavailable".
as bz already said, this is a good idea... would you like to suggest a separation?
B: keep the idea of a frame because its easy for learners.
Frames are one of the hardest concepts in mozilla. They are not XPCOM objects, they have a nebulous relationship to actual content, and why should high-level programmers care? Several layout programmers have seriously suggested revamping the entire "frame" system to avoid the class hierarchy we currently use, but this shouldn't really affect XPFE applications at all. Frames are not a "crutch concept"... most of the XPFE programmers I have ever met know next to nothing and need to know even less about how XUL/JS content is rendered. When something is rendered in an unexpected way, they post a testcase and it either gets explained or fixed.
C: make some rules to ensure frames/widgets are implemented with a degree of uniformity in the DOM/XPCOM.
What do you mean? Frames are *not* DOM objects or XPCOM objects. Most widgets are implemented with CSS/XBL, though some have extra C++ glue. Have you got a specific example of a rule in this category?
D: provide a special frame that programmers can learn on.
Learn what? What could we provide that isn't taken care of by <xul:box> and/or <html:div> and <html:span> ?
F: treat XPFE JS programmers as first class users of the
layout engine in terms of priorities.
They already are first-class users... we implement two entire browser UIs in XUL, a chat client, mail, JS debugger, and numerous other utilities; isn't that enough? What in particular do you think needs to be done to make XPFE users "first class priorities"?
Could you privately email me where these are? That would be helpful.
Biesi's diagram was posted to npm.netlib and is available here: http://stud4.tuwien.ac.at/~e0225227/mozilla_downloads.png (~140 KB)
http://stud4.tuwien.ac.at/~e0225227/mozilla_downloads.dia
Jkeiser's content & frames article was available at http://moz.zope.org/mozilla/Members/jkeiser/content_frames but it appears to be down for some reason at the moment.
--BDS
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