“The Mozilla platform is a bundle of freely available open
source technology that underlies many user-oriented software
applications. Some of these applications are desktops and some are
development tools, but the most famous ones are Web browsers,
including Mozilla, AOL for the Macintosh, Galeon on Linux, and
Netscape.“Although these browsers are mostly used to display HTML, the
platform beneath them offers much more. In particular, the Mozilla
platform’s extensive support for XML provides an alternative to
Java technology for the creation of applets and applications. In
this article, I’ll demonstrate how to create such applets using XML
tags instead of Java classes. It is a refreshingly simple, yet
powerful approach.“Although the Mozilla platform has its share of object classes
(more than a thousand at last count), it is best known for its deep
use of XML. For some flavors of XML (like XHTML), the platform
provides full rendering support while for other flavors (like RDF),
it provides support for data processing only. Rendering support is
required if an XML document is to have a visual representation. The
platform has rendering support for HTML/XHTML, MathML, optionally
SVG, and also its own XUL, covered in this article…”