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Using links in XUL

I finally conned convinced a client into using XUL for part of their application. Part of my design involved using some links to the regular non-XUL app. Luckily, the XUL Tutorial has a section on Adding HTML Elements. I looked that up, and got my links set up:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<window 
   xmlns="http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul"
   xmlns:html="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">   
   <html:a href="/default.asp">Home</html:a>
   <html:a href="/reports/reportTree.aspx">Reports</html:a>
</window>
      
That doesn't work though. The raw literals "Home" and "Reports" don't get rendered, because XUL doesn't know what to do with raw text. I tried wrapping the text in <label>s, but clicking the label didn't work. The solution was to wrap the <html:a> in another HTML element, in my case a list:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<window 
   xmlns="http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul"
   xmlns:html="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
   <html:ul>
      <html:li>
         <html:a href="/default.asp">Home</html:a>
      </html:li>
      <html:li>
         <html:a href="/reports/reportTree.aspx">Reports</html:a>
      </html:li>
   </html:ul>
</window>
      
It doesn't make much sense to me that you need to wrap the link in another HTML element for the link's text to show properly. Is that a parsing bug?

For those that noticed the link hrefs: yes, this application is so old that it uses VBScript ASP, C# ASP.NET, and now JS XUL.

posted on Thursday, June 23, 2005 1:44 PM