[Accessibility-ia2] ia2poke as a firefox extension

Michael Stewart mstewar at us.ibm.com
Thu Feb 8 05:29:55 PST 2007



Just to ensure we are all on the "know who Michael is page," I just wanted
to remind everyone that I am Michael Stewart, and I am working on a poke
tool for IA2.  The plan is to write this in Python, and I have been
exploring some technologies recently to handle the display.  A neat
suggestion (thanks Aaron) was to try to use xulrunner so that not only
would the source of the functionality be more readable and maintainable
(and modular and...) by being written in Python, but then the UI source
would also be more accessible by being written in xul.  The major problem
with this approach has been that it is nearly impossible to build PyXPCOM
against xulrunner, which would be necessary in order for Python to
communicate with xulrunner.

So there have been many hurdles along this path that are not the focus of
this email, I am on the pyxpcom activestate list and  Alex Badea posted
http://vamposdecampos.googlepages.com/pyxpcom
to the list, and I installed Minefield (FFox 3) and tried out his
extension, which works well.  I am not sure of the practicality or even the
possibility (that's why I'm writing you all!), but what if the IA2 Poke
tool, (by the working name ia2poke) were a firefox extension?  I mean, this
would require that developers using the tool install firefox of course,
but...would that actually be something installed just for this tool?  The
other possibiliity we were investigating (xulrunner) would have required
the installation of xulrunner anyway, so I am not sure that this is much
worse.  Also, depending on licenses and IP stuff, distributing an xpi
(firefox extension) that depends only on firefox, as opposed to
distributing some package that is dependent on the user having built
PyXPCOM against xulrunner (read above about the impossibility of this)
seems optimal.

Michael
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