1280669 - Add XUL support

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(L20n :: JS Library, defect)

Description

[Staś Małolepszy :stas]

L20n in Gecko should be able to localize XUL documents.

Comment 1

[Staś Małolepszy :stas]

The first PoC of this used to take advantage of XBL bindings:

    https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev/commit/6f3048f6c8f5f5716aa993da2bf283acecd07eec

In XUL, you could do:

    <localization id="browser-l10n">
        <source src="chrome://branding/locale/brand.ftl"/>
        <source src="chrome://browser/locale/browser.ftl"/>
    </localization>

And then:

    <textbox id="urlbar"
             data-l10n-bundle="browser-l10n"
             data-l10n-id"urlbar"
             …>

The value of data-l10n-bundle would be used to look up a <localization> element by the id.  This had a number of problems:

  - we don't have the <localization> elements in l20n-chrome-html at all, but we need to make XUL/XBL embeddable in HTML documents,
  - <localization> elements can't have ids because they might be part of the anonymous content bound by XBL more than once,
  - some bindings currently use <stringbundles> defined in different bindings and they refer to them from the XBL code.

Re. the last point, here's an example:  tabbrowser-tabs uses the tabs-empty-tab-title string which comes from the <localization> defined in the tabbrowser binding.  Furthermore, the <tab> which uses the binding is not part of the anonymous content and doesn't have easy access to tabbrowser's anonymous content (other than hardcoding it).

If this doesn't make sense the recap is:  it's not easy to find the appropriate <localization> element by id or other attribute because they might be hidden in anonymous content.  To mitigate this the next iteration of the implementation stored the Localization elements in a global map (document.l10n) where they can be easily retrieved from by name (document.l10n.get('main')):

    https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev/commit/714a779e9d2d04d21808200a78d313a0a286a8e2


Finally, the third iteration moved away from defining resources in <localization> elements.  Instead, the XUL API has been unified with the HTML API, i.e. <link rel="localizaton"> elements are used.

    https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev/commit/706b97044e571814aa8d845a23bdb78b1bdb45e7

Comment 2

[Axel Hecht [:Pike]]

Mass change dependency tree for bug 1279002 into a whiteboard keyword.

Comment 3

[Staś Małolepszy :stas]

Similar to bug 1288406, this shouldn't block bug 1280668 either.  We have basic XUL support on larch already.  This bug will track improving this support.

Comment 4

[Zibi Braniecki [:zbraniecki][:gandalf]]

This is now fixed.

Comment 5

[Axel Hecht [:Pike]]

Let's mark it so.