190408 - Tracking bug for obstacles to learning revealed by ISBN 0131423436

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Core Graveyard :: Tracking, defect)

Description

[Nigel McFarlane]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.2.1) Gecko/20021130
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.2.1) Gecko/20021130

NRM tracking bug for defects revealed by book work

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[Nigel McFarlane]

added [meta]

Comment 2

[Nigel McFarlane]

whoops - really added [meta]

Comment 3

[Nigel McFarlane]

Could you please assign to [e-mail]?

I have a set of bugs that span the whole Mozilla platform and
need a tracking bug to manage them. If there is a better
Product/Component combination for such a bug, please advise.
I'm working on Mozilla documentation but have both doc. and
tech. issues to work on (see bug 190406 deps).

Comment 4

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Over to tracking and to Nigel

Comment 5

[Nigel McFarlane]

This bug is for reader feedback due to the book "Rapid Application
Development with Mozilla". This bug is designed to collect remarks
about Mozilla that will help make future Mozilla versions easier
to learn.

If you find the book accurate and useable, but also find that
Mozilla is challenging to work with, then put your specific concerns
here. Better still, log your own bug and make it "block" this one.

If you find that the book itself has problems, see instead bug 190407

Comment 6

[u93378]

I have found troubles testing the code for templates.  In particular, I haven't
been able to make your Listing 14.1 work.  Here are some issues/suggestions:

1.  It would be nice if this listing and the corresponding test RDF file were
available on line for us to run.

2.  For debugging, it's very hard for me to tell what's gone wrong when I see no
instances of the template.  I have looked at the DOM inspector and the template
is there, but the data hasn't gotten into it to make instances.  There's no
obvious way to find out WHY/HOW this is failing.  Does Mozilla print any
diagnostic information if it's unable to find the datasource file?  What about
if it's unable to find the root object in the ref attribute?

3.  It's not obvious how the datasources attribute works.  In the example, this
is just a naked basename, and I couldn't determine how this basename was going
to be interpreted.  Presumably there's some default directory name, but what
would that be.  When I attempted to supply a full file URL, it didn't seem to help.

4.  It's also not obvious how the datasources might interact with the Mozilla
security model.  Must all file-reading templates be installed in chrome in order
to open files?

Comment 7

[Nigel McFarlane]

thanks for your feedback on the Mozilla book.
Did you see the current errata at www.nigelmcfarlane.com?

It points out an error in Listing 14.2 and the code is
now available for download. I'd love to hear how that gose for
you. Note: I'm going to update the errata in more detail soon.

I'm working on your general concerns, but some answers are:

2. "no and no". 

3. the default directory is the same as the directory the chrome
file is in, but also see the Errata again.

4. No. They can be on a remote website. But that's not covered
   until later.

more as it arrives.

- N.

Comment 8

[Stefan Ring]

For me as a beginning XPCOM developer, it was very annoying not to find the
ominous netscape.security.PrivilegeManager.enablePrivilege("UniversalXPConnect")
at a prominent place in the book. Luckily this question is often asked on the
usenet, so it was not that hard to find - but still, I feel it should be
mentioned where it's easy to find.

Comment 9

[Nigel McFarlane]

Now on the list of things to do ...

Comment 10

[BMO Automation]

Marking all tracking bugs which haven't been updated since 2014 as INCOMPLETE.
If this bug is still relevant, please reopen it and move it into a bugzilla component related to the work
being tracked. The Core: Tracking component will no longer be used.