lasuli-developer Mailing List for LaSuli

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Dear friends,

After the Firefox is updated to 3.08, the lasuli sidebar was broken. I  
think you will have interests to know the reason:

First you need to know how LaSuli highlight fragments.

For example, I opened a webpage from our website: http://www.hypertopic.org/test.htm

The source code of test.htm:

<html>
<body>
my content example

example my document.
</body>
</html>

Firefox send a GET request to retrieve the test.htm, then parse and  
render the page, generate a dom tree. When the page is loaded the  
firefox will raise a "state changed" event, LaSuli catch that event  
and start to get html file source code. But LaSuli only allowed to get  
the html code after firefox parsed and rendered.

So here is what LaSuli got:

<html>
<body>
my content example

example my document.
</body>
</html>

(Note: the firefox removed the useless tags, and fixed the errors)

Then we select the text (e.g. "my document") on the webpage and click  
the "highlight it" menu item. LaSuli will got the coordinate (e.g.  
52+63) of the selection. Since we use the coordinate to locate the  
fragments, we're unable to highlight the text by manipulating the dom  
element. We have to add background color via the html source code.

The following codes are the result of LaSuli highlight:

<html>
<body>
my content example

example my document.
</body>
</html>

Okay, then we need firefox to display the above highlighted html  
codes, so LaSuli replace the html codes in the browsing window with  
the highlighted html codes. Firefox re-parse and re-render the html  
file.

All of those processes work well until firefox 3.08.

Firefox 3.08 improved the security, so when the html document in the  
main windows is replaced, firefox also replaces the URL address to   
chrome://lasuli/...sidebar.xul.

That cause the conflicts with zeotro.

After few days' research, I found out that using dom to highlight the  
text is the only option. Here is what I'm planning to do:

To highligh the text (52+63):

1. Get the text content in that coordinate, in our example, that will  
be "my document".
2. Using firefox's gfind service to locate the dom element in the web  
page.
3. create a new dom element with background color to replace the  
founded dom element.

The step 2-3, is also used by other hightlight extensions. I believe  
that will work.

I'm sorry for the slow progress, and I will keep you updated.

Best regards,

Chao

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