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Mozilla Overlays: A New Way to Combine XML Documents

By Nigel McFarlane
Nov 26, 2003

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Nigel McFarlane

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Searching for Substance: The Road to Safe Software: Sep 3, 2004
Smoke, Mirrors and Silence: The Browser Wars Reignite: May 28, 2004
Mozilla Overlays: A New Way to Combine XML Documents: Nov 26, 2003
An Introductory Tour of Mozilla's XUL: Nov 21, 2003

Rapid Application Development with Mozilla: Nov 25, 2003

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From the author of
Rapid Application Development with Mozilla

What do you do if XML information is split across several documents? The Mozilla platform has a neat solution to this problem. Documents written in Mozilla's XUL dialect of XML can be merged automatically into a single, final document using a system called overlays. Nigel McFarlane describes the overlay system in this article.

Introduction

What do you do if XML information is split across several documents? You need some kind of merging or component technology, but XML doesn't have either. The Mozilla platform—the technology behind the Mozilla and Netscape applications—has a neat solution to this problem. Documents written in Mozilla's XUL dialect of XML can be merged automatically into a single, final document. That's done using a system called overlays, and that overlay system is described in this article. Overlays are suitable for web engineers who are serious about quality of design (and for hackers, too).

NOTE

XUL (pronounced "zool" if you're cool) is described in the first article in this series, "An Introductory Tour of Mozilla's XUL."

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