1) According to https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=546857 , support for remote XUL is going to be dropped. Short of designing an XSL template to render XUL as HTML (which would be a gol’ darn good idea), XUL would be left out of the picture.

2) I’ve been handed the reins for the Extension Developer Extension, and my thought was that perhaps a protocol could be designed to allow a specific format of links to be used at the site or even elsewhere (e.g., code:?lang=JS;text=….) to open up a relevant preview in a supporting extension like our EDE.

I’m also hoping to add language-aware syntax coloring via use of CodeMirror so it might meet your needs as far as presentation, assuming the crucial issue of security concerns can be addressed.

Although a web-based option would be nice, I think a client-side trigger option might also be convenient for users, especially those of us where internet service is slow, as we’d only need to download the code snippet rather than all of the JavaScript used by the highlighting/editing app (and we could take advantage of other local features like file saving). My email is brettz9 at the site known as Yahoo if you want to be in touch about it.

We hope to eventually be able to do everything you suggested. It’s just a matter of time.

Hacks was the first project as part of the larger MDN initiative, so there is a lot of great things to come!

Imagine if when you double-clicked **any** non-C/XPCOM code snippet, and the complete code opened up in an editor and there was live preview as you made changes. That should be the goal for MDC/MDN; landing pages and new banners are far less important.

It’s the documentation sites and tutorials that encourage this sort of interactivity that gain developer mindshare and make learning Web technologies a joy. Mozilla has Bespin and Firebug and all kinds of innovation on the hacks blog, but I’m not feeling it on MDC.

Thanks for all you do!