On Tue, 17 Jan 2006 12:43:37 +0000, Neil wrote:
> Philip Chee wrote:

>>Currently the back/forward menu items affect the main browser window, not the 
>>sidebar content.
> Is loading new pages in existing sidebar panels that common?

In Firefox you can bookmark a page and specify that this bookmark opens in
the sidebar (web-panels.xul). If that page's links aren't specifically coded
with target= (um I forget - but different browsers do it differently. The
current code supports MSIE as well as Opera and NS formats). Then you can
move forwards through links (but not back). I haven't yet figured out how to
make Seamonkey's bookmark allow the "open in sidebar" attribute. I guess
more digging throught the source code. Sigh.

>>It looks like I may have to initialize history
> Actually browser.xml does that for you.

Do I still have to set up any history listeners? I think I need a history
broadcaster element or something?

>>By the way <http://xsidebar.mozdev.org> now has a handful of Firefox sidebar
>>extensions modded to work with Seamonkey.

> After reading the site, I'd like to know what the significant api 
> differences are.

Um, like totally different? The major differences in Firefox are:

1. Toss out the multiple Tabs, allowing only one sidebar active at any one
time. Straight away this simplifies a lot of things and tosses out all the
code that keeps track of which tab is open or closed or not in the current
set of visible tabs, et cetra, et cetra.  This obsolete a whole bunch of
bugs in bugzilla agonising over how to manage the real estate that all those
tabs occupy, user/UI problems in navigating all those tabs, keeping track of
the state of each tab in the sidebar, and so on.

2. In Seamonkey, sidebars are registered in panels.rdf. If the remote URI
changes or the sidebar extension is uninstalled things go gang aft agley.
Lots of head scratching in bugzilla especially on how to support "partner"
content providers (I think these are from the Netscape days). I dug up some
really byzantine designs involving multiple remote rdf feeds in the
mozilla.org documentation. I think many of these docs should be moved to a
section labelled "Historical Interest Only" in big red letters.

In Firefox, a sidebar extension hooks into the sidebar via an overlay.
Uninstall the extension and presto chango it's sidebar menu item
dissappears. No need to run code to test the validity of the URIs recorded
in the panels.rdf. Toss most of the rest of the code out.

> I do agree that the sidebar implementation is fairly
> complex though.

Understatement of the year.

I guess I'll just hide the back/forward context menu items for the time being.

Question: Hovering over a link in the sidebar does NOT update the status bar
with the URL. Anybody know how I can get this to work? In the mean time I
stole some code from the tooltip enhancer extension to show the URL in the
tooltip.

Phil
-- 
Philip Chee <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
http://flashblock.mozdev.org/ http://xsidebar.mozdev.org
Guard us from the she-wolf and the wolf, and guard us from the thief,
oh Night, and so be good for us to pass.
[ ]Dumb luck beats sound planning every time.  Trust me.
* TagZilla 0.059
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