So we’ve reached a small milestone this week.. I’ll start from the beginning.

Mozilla, which we’re using as the client side software platform, has a built in framework called XPCOM which allows developers to add software components to the overall application. For example, if you developed a fast XML processing application that you wanted to use from within Mozilla, you just have to write some XPCOM ‘glue’ code to plug the component into the Mozilla application proper. You will then be able to use your XML library from within javascript, which is used to develop Mozilla applications. Currently there is built in XPCOM support for javascript and c++, and there are efforts under way to bring other languages into the fold – Python and Perl to name a few.

[Read more…] about mozilla/xpcom/javascript

In my last post I explained the basics of how we will be handling MARC records as XML. To recap, we will store our bibliographic record as MARC21slim XML documents. This format is recommended and maintained by the Library of Congress, so we feel confident using it. Now we just need to morph our binary records into XML! (WARNING: What follows is pretty technical, so hang on tight.)
[Read more…] about A Tale of Two Encodings

Previously, we mentioned CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and how it allows us to separate presentation from content in our Mozilla-based applications. We have a few screenshots to demonstrate this. Let’s start with some drastic examples:

[Read more…] about Staff Client Themes and Skins