762986 - ENH: panel, expose positioning, css, "ephemeralness"

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Add-on SDK Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[Gregg Lind (Fx Strategy and Insights - Shield - Heartbeat )]

(building on https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=732294)

Kudos on building a widget that wraps some of the nastiness of XUL panes!  

As part of building a general "moz-ui" package for notification boxes, warnings, system notifications, etc. [1][2], it would be nice to 'power up' the panel widget.

Specific problems:

1.  The css is 'prebaked' into the `show()` method.  [3]  
2.  Knowing the names of the elements in a panel (for styling) is hard!   ("chrome://global/skin/popup.css").  Add a doc for 'structure of a panel' would help. 
3.  anchoring can go on any element (great!), but it is tempting to anchor on a location, rather than get it indirectly using Bounding Boxes.  
4.  panels are really very ephemeral.  is it using 'menupopup' for it that causes this? 


[1] https://gist.github.com/gregglind/testpilot2/blob/master/lib/moz-ui.js
[2] https://gist.github.com/2563011
[3] Overrides for a 'clear' panel: https://github.com/gregglind/iconcontextmenus/blob/master/lib/panel.js

Comment 1

[Wes Kocher (:KWierso) (Not reading bugmail; email directly if needed)]

Can you file bugs for each individual improvement you want here? It would be easier to track and work on everything that way.