Migrating Projects for Firefox for 3.1.x to 3.4

This section discusses how to migrate projects to be deployed on Firefox from 3.1.x to 3.3.

GUI Components

Replace all deprecated List and Grid components with Matrix components. List and Grid are not supported in Firefox.

Character Encoding

Projects that were localized prior to General Interface 3.2 may have been saved in UTF-16 encoding. If you open these files in General Interface 3.3, they might contain junk characters. Although General Interface 3.3 might read these Unicode files, it's best to resave the project in General Interface Builder 3.3 on Internet Explorer before you proceed with the project migration. Be sure to make a backup of your project before beginning.

For applications loaded from the local disk, such as General Interface Builder, Firefox reads only non-XML files that are encoded in a standard 8-bit encoding. Firefox can read local XML files in any encoding supported by the host system only if the encoding is included in the XML declaration.

To re-encode any non-XML files from UTF-16 to 8-bit ASCII, you can use General Interface Builder 3.3 running in Internet Explorer or a text editor.

To re-encode non-XML files from UTF-16 to 8-bit ASCII, complete these steps:

1. Open General Interface Builder in Internet Explorer.
2. Choose Tools > IDE Settings to open the IDE Settings dialog.
3. Make sure the Output character encoding field is blank.
4. Open and re-save each file.

You will not be able to include any non-ASCII characters in these plain text files. For the best compatibility with Firefox, all extended ASCII and 16-bit characters should be externalized in XML files that declare their character encoding in the XML declaration.

XML files do not need to be re-encoded as described above, although they can be. However, if an XML file is encoded in UTF-16 or any other non-ASCII character encoding, the encoding must be added to the XML declaration. Add or modify the first line of the XML file with the following XML declaration:

<?xml encoding="UTF-16"?>

Note that component serialization files are also XML files. If they have been encoded in UTF-16, they must also be modified as described above.

XPath and XSLT Requirements

XSL must meet these requirements to work properly in Firefox:

• The XSL must include the following namespace:

  xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"

  * The XSL must output valid XML. Balanced tags are required. For example,

  <xMessage>Hello World!</xMessage>

  
  

  • The only output formats supported for XSLT processing are HTML 4.0 and XML.
    
  • XSLT implementation does not support the namespace axis, limiting the ability to query and discover namespaces. The DOM-based interface also fails to implement this axis.
    
  • XSLT implementation does not support the node-set() method, which means that complex parameters and result tree fragments cannot be resolved.
    
  • XSLT implementation does not allow output escaping to be disabled, which means that escaped entities cannot be resolved during a transformation.