Desktop XUL apps
April 19th, 2004 by 
Phil
I was all set to write a post about how we should be using centralised apps with XUL frontends for aggregation to provide native interfaces regardless of location but I find that Manuzhai beat me to it
I think an online XUL aggregator is perfect: a rich UI, but available from anywhere in the world.
He mentions XUL Channels which is no longer available because of hosting problems, and it’s certainly a start (the source is available and took me a grand total 2 minutes to set up). It’s missing a host of features such as multiple users, read/unread items, flagging, Atom supoprt etc. but given that the code alone is six months old this is probably fair enough.
Presumably with a bit of hacking it would be possible to make this an executable app (loading it via the chrome:// command like ChatZilla). It could also read any feeds for which an RDF transformation is available, and the missing features don’t seem like they’d be that hard to add in – XUL’s a doddle after all 
The hardest part would probably be dealing with HTML entities, which it currently appears to struggle with, but they could always be stripped out in the first instace. Do I smell the future burning bright?
