While googling around on an unrelated topic yesterday, I discovered WaMCoM Mozilla. "The intention of WaMCom.org is to produce web browser and mail client software that is more stable and more correct than the test releases produced by the Mozilla.org organization, in the hope it is suitable for end users. In order to achieve that, stable Mozilla releases are extended with correctness fixes. In addition it contains some security and cryptography enhancements."
Most important for my purposes, WaMCoM makes Mozilla 1.3.1 available for Mac OS 9. In this morning's testing it appears substantially more stable than the Mozilla 1.2.1 I had been using. The Mozilla Project dropped support for Mac OS 9 after 1.2.1, a version that has an annoying tendency to crash when more than a dozen or so windows are open. I need to spend a couple more weeks with this to be sure, but I've been happily surfing this morning using WaMCoM with dozens of windows open simultaneously, and right now it looks like all Mac OS 9 users should upgrade. This may let me put off buying a new desktop Mac and switching to OS X for a few more months. Hmm, Looks like I spoke too soon. I just managed to crash it by opening a few dozen pages at the New York Times. Still it may be a bit more satble than 1.2.1.
Micah Dubinko has written XForms Essentials, an introduction to XForms, "a combination of two of the most successful experiments ever performed with the Web: XML and forms." The book is freely available online and for $29.95 on paper (usual discounts apply). It's published under the Gnu Free Documentation License. According to Dubinko,
You should read this book if you want to:
- Create XForms files in a text or XML editor
- Convert existing forms (electronic or paper) to XForms
- Collect XML data from users in a user-friendly way
- Reduce the amount of JavaScript needed within browser interfaces
- Increase the security and reliability of your current information system by combining client-side and server-side checks into a common code base
- Understand how to create interactive web sites using the latest standard technology