Add HTML Elements to XUL Addons
I've been working on a new addon at Mozilla which isn't anywhere near finished so I wont bother telling you what it's meant to do...because it could change at any moment. Since this is my first real addon, it's been a struggle, but that's a good thing -- it means I'm learning a ton. One problem I ran into was trying to get a checkbox (INPUT) element within the addon via JavaScript -- nothing was displaying.
After a bit of research and guesswork, I figured out what I was doing wrong -- I was using the wrong document method to create the element:
var input = document.createElementNS("http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml", "input");
Using document.createElementNS with the proper namespace resulted in my checkbox displaying in all of its glory. It's beautiful square, checked glory. Firefox addons can be created in a number of ways so if you're looking to create your own and you aren't seeing HTML elements correctly, keep this solution in mind!
![Page Visibility API]()
One event that's always been lacking within the document is a signal for when the user is looking at a given tab, or another tab. When does the user switch off our site to look at something else? When do they come back?
![How I Stopped WordPress Comment Spam]()
I love almost every part of being a tech blogger: learning, preaching, bantering, researching. The one part about blogging that I absolutely loathe: dealing with SPAM comments. For the past two years, my blog has registered 8,000+ SPAM comments per day. PER DAY. Bloating my database...
![CSS pointer-events]()
The responsibilities taken on by CSS seems to be increasingly blurring with JavaScript. Consider the -webkit-touch-callout CSS property, which prevents iOS's link dialog menu when you tap and hold a clickable element. The pointer-events property is even more JavaScript-like, preventing:
click actions from doing...
![How to Create a Twitter Card]()
One of my favorite social APIs was the Open Graph API adopted by Facebook. Adding just a few META tags to each page allowed links to my article to be styled and presented the way I wanted them to, giving me a bit of control...
Reminded me of my initial days with JavaScript David! I also made the same namespace errors and then wondered for hours, what went wrong!