Archive for the 'Firefox' Category

We have a couple of new articles on MDC that are of interest to Firefox 3.1 users (among others).  I wrote neither of them (which makes me so happy), but want to be sure everyone is aware of them:

Arun wrote the article HTTP access control, which provides details on how HTTP access control works in Firefox 3.1.  This includes examples of both server and client side code, as well as examples of what the HTTP transactions themselves look like.  It’s very useful information that will be of interest to anyone that wants to use web fonts and cross-site XMLHttpRequests.

Mossop put together a handy article that covers the basics of listening to events, including both DOM events and web progress events; this incorporates both stuff existing prior to Firefox 3.1 and the new “all tabs” listeners introduced in Firefox 3.1.

There’s still plenty of stuff left to write about for Firefox 3.1, but we’re making great headway, and it’s sure helpful when others contribute content like this!

I’ve written the initial pass of the article Updating extensions for Firefox 3.1, which provides helpful hints to developers that need to update their extensions.

In addition, new content on native JSON has been written, and I’m working on an article that covers listening for web progress events on all tabs.  The latter probably won’t be finished until tomorrow.

I’ve just finished documenting the Element Traversal API that is supported by Firefox 3.1.  This involves several new attributes added to the DOM Element object:

• childElementCount
• children
• firstElementChild
• lastElementChild
• nextElementSibling
• previousElementSibling

These make it easy to walk through a document’s elements to manipulate the element hierarchy.  You can work with them in real-time, making live changes to the elements, adding new ones, and so forth.

Turns out that there won’t be any changes to the DOM workers spec after all, so they’re fair game.  I’ll be resuming work on this documentation shortly.

For the past few days, I’ve been doing little bits of work here and there on some of the smaller topics that need covering, updating articles that only wind up needing a paragraph tweaked here or there, that kind of thing.  It’s not glamorous, but it’s a living.

As we make our way headlong toward shipping Firefox 3.1 beta 2, if you know of something that you think should be documented prior to its release, please feel free to make your suggestions.  While we’re on a very good track to have the documentation essentially complete by the first release candidate, we  won’t have everything done by beta 2.  So I’m working on prioritizing now.

Since I’ve blogged totally failed to blog about the work I’ve been doing on documenting DOM workers recently, I figured it’s only fair to mention that I’ve gotten word that the specification may be changing soon.  So that writing work is on hold for a bit.

Fortunately, there’s plenty of other stuff to write about!

I’ve adapted Ehsan Akhgari’s recent blog post on private browsing into an article on MDC with some added details.  In addition, I’ve written the reference material for the nsIPrivateBrowsingService interface.

So that should be pretty much done now.  Enjoy!

Here’s a list of even more interfaces for which the documentation has been updated to Firefox 3.1:

• nsISessionStore
• nsIThreadPool
• nsIThreadPoolListener
• nsIXPCScriptable
• nsITimer
  

Note that a couple of these (notably nsIXPCScriptable) are not very thorough documents, but are up-to-date in that they at least mention all the new stuff, which is covered in roughly the same amount of detail (or lack thereof) as anything else therein.

With these, all of the interfaces already documented on MDC have been updated to cover Firefox 3.1 (as it stands today).  There are plenty of interfaces that aren’t documented yet, though.  We’ll get to them!

I’ve updated the following articles with Firefox 3.1 content:

• nsIDocShell
• nsIAppShellService
• nsIDOMWindowInternal
• nsIDragSession
• nsIDragService
• nsIFaviconService
• nsIJSXMLHttpRequest
• nsILivemarkService
• nsILoginManager

There’s more to come, but figured I’d share.

I’ve just added a new section to the introduction to using the Storage API, called “Executing a statement asynchronously.”  This provides a simple example of how to create and execute a statement asynchronously (go figure).

Hopefully this will be useful!  Enjoy!

Today I’m working on updating the documentation for Storage.  We have new or updated reference documentation for the following interfaces:

• mozIStorageResultSet
• mozIStoragePendingStatement
• mozIStorageStatement
• mozIStorageRow
• mozIStorageError

Documentation for mozIStorageStatementCallback is coming very shortly.