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
    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...

  • By
    Vibration API

    Many of the new APIs provided to us by browser vendors are more targeted toward the mobile user than the desktop user.  One of those simple APIs the Vibration API.  The Vibration API allows developers to direct the device, using JavaScript, to vibrate in...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Spyjax:  Ajax For Evil Using Dojo

    The idea of Spyjax is nothing new. In pasts posts I've covered how you can spy on your user's history with both MooTools and jQuery. Today we'll cover how to check user history using the Dojo Toolkit. The HTML For the sake of this...

  • By
    MooTools History Plugin

    One of the reasons I love AJAX technology so much is because it allows us to avoid unnecessary page loads.  Why download the header, footer, and other static data multiple times if that specific data never changes?  It's a waste of time, processing, and bandwidth.  Unfortunately...

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!