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

Incredible Demos

  • By
    MooTools Star Ratings with MooStarRating

    I've said it over and over but I'll say it again:  JavaScript's main role in web applications is to enhance otherwise boring, static functionality provided by the browser.  One perfect example of this is the Javascript/AJAX-powered star rating systems that have become popular over the...

  • By
    Use Elements as Background Images with -moz-element

    We all know that each browser vendor takes the liberty of implementing their own CSS and JavaScript features, and I'm thankful for that. Mozilla and WebKit have come out with some interesting proprietary CSS properties, and since we all know that cementing standards...

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!