Anything within this dashed red border is editable by Mozile. If you are using a current version of the Mozilla or Mozilla Firefox browsers, then you should be able to click here and start typing. Mozile strives to work very much like a normal word-processor. Note that other browsers are not supported, and likely will not be supported; Mozile makes use of advanced technology only available from the Mozilla project.
What can you do? Well, with Mozile's XHTMLBasic module running, you can do most of the things that you can do in a normal word-processor. Try it! You can:
- Make text bold, italic, underlined, or all three at once.
- You can apply CSS styles with the click of a button, making text large or small, superscript, subscript, different fonts, and with different foreground and background colors.
- You can justify a block of text to the right hand side of the page.
- You can also remove the formatting from a section of text.
- You can edit preformatted text, where spaces, tabs, and
newlines are preserved.
- Insert links, images
, lists. Change the document title, the style attribute of an element, or set any attribute of the selected element to any value you want.
- Edit HTML, XHTML, and many types of XML documents.
- And more!
Mozile is designed to be exceptionally configurable. You can create your own commands, which can do anything to your documents that JavaScript, the DOM, and CSS can do. You can also create your own modules, which extend Mozile in any way you like.
Not everything in the document has to be editable! You can choose which arts are editable and which are not.
How to Use Mozile in Your Documents
We are always working to make Mozile as simple as possible to use. Here are the steps you must follow to make Mozile work:
- Download a copy of Mozile from our website and install it on your server. Mozile is really just a collection of JavaScript files, which extend the functionality of Mozilla browsers.
- In the page you want to edit, create a new
script element which points to a copy of the mozile.js configuration file. It should look something like this: <script type="application/x-javascript" src="../core/mozile.js"/> It's very important that the src attribute gives the correct path to the mozile.js file.
- Now change the configuration in the
mozile.js file to suit your situation. The default settings should be fine for simple cases. If you want to have more than one page using Mozile, and more than on configuration, then make copies of the mozile.js file, and make sure that the mozileScriptSource setting is correct.
- Now Mozile will load into your document, but no editors will appear. The last step is to add editor commands to the
mozile.js file where is says "Create Mozile Editor". By default there is a command which adds a Mozile editor to any element with its class attribute set to editor. You can add other commands which will create editors based on the id attribute of the element, or using CSS selectors.
That's it! If it seems a little tricky, take a look at the source code for this page, which follows the steps above exactly.
There are some things your shouldn't do: It's not recommended to put one Mozile editor inside another one, and it's best to use block-level elements as editors, like div elements.
What is Working Now? What's Still in Development?
The version of Mozile which you are using right now is called the Mozile 0.7 series. It is a rewrite of the Mozile 0.6 series, and it does not yet include all of the features which the older version had. However, the new code is much cleaner, better documented, and more extensible. Of, and it's a whole lot faster too.
Features currently implemented in Mozile 0.7 include all of the basic XHTML editing demonstrated above. It supports modules, and has a number of useful commands for XHTML editing.
Improvements to the Mozile 0.6 series:
- eDOM replaced with faster, Mozilla-native methods. Many nagging eDOM bugs are gone.
- Both server-side and extension systems, living together in harmony, using a single shared code-base.
- Object-oriented and modular design, much cleaner and better documented than before.
- New customizable command system, much more powerful than the old MES.
- Unit testing suite. Currently incomplete, but it works and it will catch up.
Important features which still have to be reimplemented include:
- Saving. Currently Mozile can only show a dialog containing the current source of the page.
- Copy, Cut, and Paste.
- Source editing.
- Tag view mode.
Important new features which were not in the 0.6 series, but which are planned for the 0.7 series include:
- XML Validation.
- Proper table editing.
- Localization tools.
- Skinning tools.
Known bugs:
- White-space (especially spaces) might not be handled the way you extect. This is because of the HTML/XML white-space handling rules. I think we just have to live with it...
- The three editing modes (HTML, XHTML, and XML) don't yet make any of difference yet, but they will.
- Browser keyboard shortcuts sometimes get in the way of Mozile's keyboard shortcuts.
- Editing caret is not automatically detected and turned on. This requires special privileges.
- Keyboard commands which create popups may get blocked by the Firefox popup blocker. This doesn't apply to button clicks, however.
- Button menuitems should show checkmarks when the corresponding command is active. However, they don't refresh until a mouseover, and detecting colors versus background colors can be a problem.
- The selection sometimes gets lost when changing the block element.
- The focus gets lost when moving the cursor out of link elements, or out of editable areas.
- Tooltips aren't working.
- List tools aren't as robust as they should be.
- The cursor may pause for a moment when entering a new element. The effect is more noticable the more commands are bing used. It should be possible to optimize this, and you can set the toolbarUpdateFrequency to 1 or 0 if it really bugs you.
- Warning before leaving a page should be smarter.
All these things will get done, just as soon as somebody does them! Drop by our web site http://mozile/mozdev.org to find out how you can lend a hand.