[MonoDevelop] Upcoming release

[Michael Hutchinson]

On 2/17/07, Scott Ellington <scottell.lists at gmail.com> wrote:
> The way I understand it, none of this XUL stuff would be necessary if
> gtkmozembed exposes the dom.  It would just be like:
>
> WebControl.DOM.Tables[0].Rows ......
>
> That may be simplistic on my part.

It is simplistic :)

The reason we have the XUL is so that we have an interactive editing
surface on which you can edit text and move and resize controls. These
behaviours pretty much have to be implemented in JavaScript.

DOM access would be nice -- it would help to improve the
communications between the designer surface (XUL/JS) and the designer
host (C#), and remove the need for unmanaged code -- but it's not a
silver bullet.

Actually, another way to eliminate the unmanaged code I'd considered
right at the beginning was to use a tiny web server (C#) and XmlHttp
(JS) to communicate between the host and the editing surface. This is
still feasible, if ugly, and would be a simple drop-in solution...

The other problem is the need to deploy the XUL code to the global
Mozilla profile, as root. There are two ways around this that I can
identify:
 * set up a per-user MonoDevelop Mozilla profile and deploy the
current editing surface to that
 * use a different JS-based editor for the design surface, not
requiring full XPCOM privileges

-- 
Michael Hutchinson
http://mjhutchinson.com