MeatballWiki

MozillaSidebar

You open Mozilla (MozillaBrowser) or NetscapeSix (NetScape) and it comes with a series of boxes down the left-hand side, under the words "My Sidebar". This is the MozillaSidebar, and you can program your own boxes. There's just a few things to remain aware of:

  • You have to point back at the main window. All the links should have target be set to "_content".
  • You don't have some tricks. One trick I like using is putting a title attribute on a div or a span tag, which will make that act like the alt attribute of an img tag, which means that if you hover your mouse over an image, it tells you the alt text. You can put inline footnotes that way. I had been using that to display last-change information, to avoid having to put it in the open, but it doesn't work in the sidebar.
  • But ECMAScript, DOM and all the other standards we want Mozilla to be compliant with work in there.
  • When writing up a panels.rdf, keep it in the text editor, because if Mozilla doesn't like your panels.rdf, it deletes it. Always make backups.

Here's how I did it in NetscapeSix.

  1. Exit the browser
  2. Find the panels.rdf file.
  3. Edit it.

Here is an example of an empty sidebar except for the Meatball entry. The idea is by DaveJacoby and the content is from his [portal].

 <nowiki>
 <?xml version="1.0"?>
 <RDF:RDF xmlns:NC="http://home.netscape.com/NC-rdf#"

xmlns:RDF="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#">

   <RDF:Description about="urn:sidebar:current-panel-list"

NC:version="0.1">

     <NC:panel-list resource="rdf:#$wjDdh"/>
   </RDF:Description>
   <RDF:Description about="file:///C:/WINNT/Profiles/ASC.000/Anwendungsdaten/Mozilla/Profiles/alex/zvh4usjb.slt/"

NC:exclude="navigator:browser" />

   <RDF:Description about=""

NC:exclude="navigator:browser" />

   <RDF:Description ID="meatball"

NC:title="MeatballWiki" NC:content="http://csociety.ecn.purdue.edu/~jacoby/Portal/Includes/meatball.html" />

   <RDF:Seq about="rdf:#$wjDdh">
     <RDF:li resource="#meatball"/>
   </RDF:Seq>
 </RDF:RDF>
 </nowiki>

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I managed to get this working in MozillaBrowser 0.9.7 - very neat, thanks for documenting this. I have now done a basic sidebar for TWiki as well. You can also use a URL to auto-add a panel to the sidebar - see the javascript: URL used to add the TWiki sidebar in TWiki:Codev/MozillaSidebar. -- RichardDonkin

You can now do this with InternetExplorer - see InternetExplorerSidebar.

OperaBrowser has a similar feature - see OperaHotList.

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