HOWTO: Creating a del.icio.us side-bar and installer

Any XHTML document can be used as a side-bar, footer bar, toolbar or explorer bar. This makes it very easy to build bars that extend your browser, and all that we need to do is to let the browser know where to find the XHTML documents. We do this not be creating standard desktop installers, but by creating XForms that call the Soft-bar Installer API. This API provides functions to add and remove bars.

This tutorial will show how to use the API to create an installer, and to illustrate the technique we'll place the del.icio.us bookmark form created in the Introduction to XForms in a side-bar. In order to illustrate how any document can be used as a 'soft bar', we won't make any changes at all to the bookmark form, with all the work being done by the installer.

The sample and source code are available from here.

Tutorial reviewed on 2006-12-07, by MB.

TODO: Incorporate material from A del.icio.us Link Manager Written in XForms.