http://www.faser.net/mab/chrome/content/mab.xul

Just in case you didn't know, it's an entire application framework built into the browser. The above link should work in any gecko-based browser, but not IE or opera. Just in case you haven't seen XUL at work over the web...

Nice. Reminds me of that OS someone made for XUL.

Nifty, but it seems kinda useless...

That's awesome. Can you get it to work on other sites besides Amazon.com?

Awesome!

That is so cool.

An interesting concept.

The point is, you can use XUL to create rich user interfaces that load just as fast or faster than regular HTML-based user interfaces. For example, we could create a backend for Massassi using XUL that would work similar to that. That page is designed just to interface with amazon.com, but the interface is the part I was interested in.

Thats what I figured. Hence the question about whether or not it could also interface with other sites, or if it was designed specifically to work with just Amazon.com. :p

that is awesome.

Better example here...

Strange that firefox users tend to be some of the most vociferous advocates of w3 standards and portability and opponents of the proprietary markups and suchlike which are used in IE, and then turn around and endorse something which is non-portable and [at least for now] proprietary, &c.

Though on a sidenote, the basic interface of gibbik's example works in opera 8 beta at least, though the applications themselves don't particularly.

There is nothing non-portable OR non-standard OR proprietary about XUL. The full specs and implementation details are 100% free and available to anyone, including competing browser vendors (even the for-profit ones). I think you are misunderstanding what "closed," "proprietary," and "standard" mean.

None of the games seem to work. They load up but I think the keyboard input is all screwed up. For instance, when I use up/down/left/right/space it tries to do stuff elsewhere in the browser, not control the game.

Thank you!

I had been looking for this.

It works, just you have to reopen it a bunch sometimes. I just played Pag-Man.

Psh. I'm cooler than Firefox.





Oh wait....

I stand corrected, Brian. Perhaps i was a bit too rash.

What i meant was that i was sketchy about a push to move towards a technology which /currently/ only works on a single line of browser. This isn't to say i don't find the technology very intriguing and with a lot of potential; however it does bring back shades of say the xmlgetrequest hacks used in firefox, which the opera developers for a long time considered strictly non-compliant, leading gmail to only work in firefox until gmail cleaned up their act and code a bit [as far as a i know] and support for it became more possible.

As i mentioned above, the basic interface works in the 8b series of opera at least, however i foresee more in-depth being rather low on the development cycle list of priorities. I will look into it on the boards and suggest work, however full integration may have to wait until the next version [8 being in beta currently].

[edit: i just noticed after scanning the code that the basic interface menuing system is div-based rather than xul-based, so i stand corrected]

On the other hand, i can't see Links/Lynx, as great as they are, ever having support for this, by very nature of their nature, said being exactly one of the reaons i tend to look down on flash-driven interfaces as well. That being a decent part of what i meant by non-portable.

In my personal web design work, and my critique of that of others, i tend to be a strong propnent of the idea that so long as the code is standards-compliant, the actual browser it is on should be virtually transparent from a rendering standpoint. Now i realize this is difficult if not outright impossible at times, particularly when it comes to trying to make ddesigns that work in firefox and opera line up in ie without damaging w3.

If properly laterally implemented, i feel that xul could be radical, however until then i'm not certain how viable it really is.

No, gbk, Brian's example is far more useful. Damn, I didn't realize how awesome that really is. It's about 100x faster than using Amazon.com.

QFT

I didnt say Robin was more useful (truthfully, its useless), I said it was a better example of the power of XUL.

swish