A few months ago, I announced the veg-o-matic project. We developed user scripts using Greasemonkey to then republish microformatted content into reblog 2.0 Alpha. The idea was to create a way of generating an attention stream that could be shared with a group of people. This attention stream would extend beyond material made available in RSS. For instance, members of a work group could extract contact information of an important sales lead (formatted using the hCard HTML microformat) from a web page and post it in their information stream for other members to use.
The advantage of using greasemonkey was that it allowed full access to firefox's exemplary XML-processing capabilities in a pretty easy-to-master scripting environment. For security reasons, the most recent release of greasemonkey doesn't allow you to use a large portion of firefox's native XML support in greasemonkey scripts. This change effectively breaks the front-end of veg-o-matic, and it is unclear there is an easy fix.
While I understand the developers' security concerns, it seems like one of the major selling points of using greasemonkey just went away without much compensation.
Update: The lead developer of Greasemonkey has posted a comment in which he assures me the removal of the XML processing capabilities is only temporary due to a bug. The one nit I would pick is that how to convert legacy code to the now-supported E4X, an emerging javascript standard for XML-processing, is not always obvious. Let me recommend this resource for it which got me going enough to realize the extent to which my stuff did not work.
Hi, Greasemonkey developer here.
I'm very sorry about having to remove the XML extras package from Greasemonkey. This is a temporary measure until bug 318489 (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=318489 ) is fixed.
However, I'm pretty sure that you should be able to do everything you were doing with DOMParser and XMLSerializer with E4X. Actually, I find the E4X interface a lot nicer (if poorly documented).
http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/E4X
Have you tried this work around as reported on the GM mailing list?
var dp = new XPCNativeWrapper(window, "DOMParser").DOMParser
I rewrote my little GM script in E4X instead...