Add HTML Elements to XUL Addons

By  on  

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!

Recent Features

  • By
    Designing for Simplicity

    Before we get started, it's worth me spending a brief moment introducing myself to you. My name is Mark (or @integralist if Twitter happens to be your communication tool of choice) and I currently work for BBC News in London England as a principal engineer/tech...

  • By
    CSS @supports

    Feature detection via JavaScript is a client side best practice and for all the right reasons, but unfortunately that same functionality hasn't been available within CSS.  What we end up doing is repeating the same properties multiple times with each browser prefix.  Yuck.  Another thing we...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Cross Browser CSS Box Shadows

    Box shadows have been used on the web for quite a while, but they weren't created with CSS -- we needed to utilize some Photoshop game to create them.  For someone with no design talent, a.k.a me, the need to use Photoshop sucked.  Just because we...

  • By
    MooTools Fun with Fx.Shake

    Adding movement to your website is a great way to attract attention to specific elements that you want users to notice. Of course you could use Flash or an animated GIF to achieve the movement effect but graphics can be difficult to maintain. Enter...

Discussion

  1. Reminded me of my initial days with JavaScript David! I also made the same namespace errors and then wondered for hours, what went wrong!

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!