XTech 2005 Presentations

Mozilla E4X - Brendan Eich: "ECMAScript for XML" (ECMA-357), a new standard for writing and processing XML directly in JavaScript (ECMA-262, ISO-16262). E4X marries XML and JavaScript syntax, and extends JavaScript to include namespaces, qualified names, and XML elements and lists. E4X also adds new JavaScript operators for filtering XML lists, and for enumerating XML children and descendants. Another E4X feature: the ability to bind a W3C DOM document to a new XML object, reflecting the DOM in E4X terms so that updates to either the DOM or the E4X object hierarchy show up in the other.

Directions of the Mozilla RDF engine: website scripting, standards conformance and perfomance - Axel Hecht: This presentation showed new developments in the Mozilla RDF engine. These include plans to expose the RDF API to public web content, as well as performance and correctness improvements.

Rich Web: SVG And Canvas In Mozilla - Robert O'Callahan: Today's Web browsers offer somewhat limited graphics capabilities to Web developers. Advances in hardware, especially graphics processors, offer the potential for far richer graphics in interactive applications. To realize this potential in Web applications, browsers must expose rich new graphics APIs to Web content. The Mozilla project will meet this challenge with two major new features to be delivered in Firefox 1.1: integrated SVG and a new canvas HTML element. Work is also underway "under the hood" on a new unified graphics architecture that uses 3D graphics processors to accelerate all rendering. This work provides additional benefits to Web developers such as the ability to apply SVG effects to HTML content.

Extending Gecko with XBL and XTF - Brian Ryner: This session explored ways to extend Mozilla/Firefox to handle new XML tags and namespaces via drop-in extensions to the layout engine.

XUL - Mozilla's XML User Interface Language - Ben Goodger: Ben Goodger, lead engineer for Mozilla Firefox, talked about XUL, Mozilla's XML User Interface toolkit.