[MonoDevelop] Upcoming release

[Michael Hutchinson]

On 2/17/07, Scott Ellington <scottell.lists at gmail.com> wrote:
> Speaking of the ASP.Net designer, my feeling is that we should press to
> get gtkmozembed to expose the html dom (maybe the css and javascript).
> Once that is done everything should be pretty easy.

Here's my take on this..

The four big issues I have at the moment are:

1) Accessing XPCOM from C# -- I have to do it through a C++ glue
layer. This means we have to deploy unmanaged code which is build
against the moving target that is the Mozilla source tree. The whole
DOM etc is already available as XPCOM.

2) Installing the XUL addin code. It needs to be installed into a
Mozilla profile to get the permissions we need to use the editor
components. If this could be avoided by setting the necessary
permissions from XPCOM code that would simplify things a lot. An
alternative would be some kind of profile management so we could
deploy user profiles with the addin installed.

3) The XUL addin in broken with Mozilla 1.8 or later (i.e. Firefox).
I'm not familiar with the JS/XUL myself and haven't managed to resolve
this. In the short-term this is the worst of the three issues, as it
totally breaks the addin.

4) Mozilla composer is horribly outdated and mangles XHTML.

> If this can't happen I'd consider switching to gtkhtml.  Or somebody
> could write a managed browser :)

That's not as easy as it sounds. You'd need to replicate the current
XUL-based stuff that handles resizing controls and editing text and
tables.

Another solution might be to replace the whole XUL addin with
something derived from one of the modern XHTML-friendly browser-based
HTML editors. That wouldn't require the profile installation, and the
only problem remaining would be the unmanaged code. It would be a lot
of work, but fortunately it communicates with the C# code via a small,
well-defined interface which can be seen in the first part of
AspNetEdit/chrome/content/aspdesigner/editor.js

-- 
Michael Hutchinson
http://mjhutchinson.com