XML News from Monday, November 2, 2009

The Mozilla Project has posted the first beta of Firefox 3.6 for Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows. I finally managed to make this version show me my scrollbars again. Apparently there was an incompatibility with the theme I was using. Overall 3.6 looks like the strongest release since the last of the 2.0 series, though its AppleScript support is still incomplete. On Windows, though, I find myself gravitating to Chrome more and more.

On the "What are they smoking?" front, I notice that this release adds a choose() method to XPath which "should be used instead of if(), which has been deprecated." Where the hell did they get that idea from? I'm not up to date with every last detail of XPath 2, but I don't think it has a choose() function, and I didn't think Firefox was implementing XPath 2.0 either. XPath 1.0 doesn't have an if() function. Did I miss something? OK. Found it. This is an XForms 1.1 extension function. I hope they properly namespace this outside of XForms, but it doesn't look like they will. Time to file a bug. Maybe it's just a documentation problem.