253147 - Need ability to overlay elements with no id's (via xpath?)

Status: NEW

(Core :: XUL, enhancement)

Description

[Eyal Rozenberg]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8a3) Gecko/20040721
Build Identifier: 

XUL authors often neglect to set the id's of container elements, e.g.:

http://lxr.mozilla.org/seamonkey/source/mailnews/compose/prefs/resources/content/pref-composing_messages.xul

and overlay authors are unable to add elements to these containers without
resorting to writing event handlers or other such dirty tricks. One would expect
an attribute of currentposition="n" (i.e. modify the existing element in the
n'th position; this would not be like position="n" which means insert before the
existing element in the n'th position). On the face of it, not too difficult to
implement (after all, the position attribute already means there's some by-index
matching going on).

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[Vladimir Vukicevic [:vlad] [:vladv] (needinfo me, slow to respond)]

If someone ends up being gung-ho to do this, why not just use XPath?

Comment 2

[Robert Kaiser]

XPath-based overlaying would sound really nice to me...

Comment 3

[Nickolay_Ponomarev]

http://wiki.mozilla.org/XUL:XPath_in_Overlays