XUL-Enhanced Web Apps

This article presents a little-known use of XUL (Mozilla’s user-interface language) and shows how to take advantage of its superior performance and accessibility over HTML while maintaining cross-browser compatibility. I will illustrate this using a proof-of-concept JavaScript library that can render UI widgets using either XUL or DHTML.

If possible, you will want to open this page in Firefox. The side-by-side examples below will not make much sense otherwise.

Side-by-Side Tabbed Panel Example

• On the left we have a (very) basic DHTML implementation of tabbed panels.
• On the right, provided you are using Firefox, you will see the same panel rendered with XUL.
• In any other browser, the second panel degrades to the DHTML implementation and therefore looks identical to the one on the left.