280900 - RFE: Automatically offer XTF xpi installation based on namespace

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core Graveyard :: XTF, enhancement)

Description

[s.marshall]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8b) Gecko/20050201 Firefox/1.0+
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8b) Gecko/20050201 Firefox/1.0+

The XTF feature allows XPI extensions to offer support for namespaced XML tags
in Gecko. It would be nice if, supposing a user visits a Web page which includes
tags with a certain namespace, Firefox could check to see whether an xpi is
available for that namespaces and (if so) offer to install it.

This would make XTF extensions work the same way as browser plugins.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Visit a page that uses XForms such as
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/xforms/calc.xhtml


Actual Results:  
Browser displays a broken version of part of the calculator

Expected Results:  
Should have informed me that I needed to install an extension to view the
content on that page. Clicking on the warning bar should have automatically
linked to the XPI. (Or a warning preventing me installing it if software
installation was disabled or the host site wasn't whitelisted.)

Ideally, the installation should proceed without restart or restart should do
less damage to current state (bug 218947).

(I.e. same/similar behaviour as plugins)

There are two technical ways I can think of to provide the information necessary
for this solution:

1) Mozilla.org hosts a list of known namespaces and corresponding extensions
which Firefox periodically checks when encountering an unsupported namespace.

2) Firefox checks at the namespace URL (caching the result) to see whether there
is a valid RDDL file (see http://www.xml.com/pub/r/1003) which includes a
mozilla.org-specified entry describing the XPI files for each platform.

The first option has security advantages; the second is less monolithic and more
web-centric but does mean that co-operation of the 'owner' of a format (whoever
serves that namespace URL) is required in order to add automatic support for it
in Firefox.



I am definitely not an expert on every detail of this and I don't know how the
XTF feature works at all; from a user and XML developer point of view, this bug
just represents how I think it should work. I think XTF extensions - XForms and
future - should be first-class extensions that are treated equally to plugins
from a usability point of view.

Comment 1

[Allan Beaufour]

I had the same idea (or a stub xpi) in bug 290466.

Comment 2

[Alex Vincent [:WeirdAl]]

XTF has been removed from the tree.

Comment 3

[Alex Vincent [:WeirdAl]]

[xtfisdead] for filtering purposes.