To Jar or Not to Jar the Lizard
Before you start your Lizard skin surgery, you have to do a little magic so that you will be able to see the effects of your surgery when you look at the Lizard's skin. That's because the Lizard's makers packed his chrome and skin files in JARs (Java ARchive).
Don't let the word Java get you all shook up. You do not need to know anything about Java to do Mozilla-skinning. That's because Fabian Guisset's clever tutorial, MozillaQuest Magic: Enabling Changes Made to Mozilla-Based Browsers & Applications Chrome, shows you how to make an end-run around the Mozilla JARs. Please read MozillaQuest Magic now and bypass the Mozilla JAR files as that MozillaQuest Magic tutorial shows you how to so do. You need to bypass the JARs before you start the Lizard-branding tutorial in the next section of this article.
As mentioned above, some builds do not have the chrome and skin directories expanded, some do. In Netscape 6, the chrome and skin files are not un-jarred (expanded). To make the end-run around the JAR files and follow along here with this tutorial, you will need to have Mozilla builds that have the chrome and skin directories expanded. So please use the mozilla-win32.zip build file in Windows or the mozilla-i686-pc-linux-gnu_tar.gz build file in Linux.
When you download and install the Mozilla browser suite mozilla-win32.zip or mozilla-i686-pc-linux-gnu_tar.gz builds, the chrome and skin directories and files are un-jarred automatically. Please see Figure 3, below.
However, the Netscape 6 installation process does not un-jar the chrome and skin directories. Please see Figure 4 (next page).
If you want to create your own Netscape 6 theme(s) or skin(s), you first will have to un-jar the Netscape 6 chrome and skin directories and files.
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Figure 3. Mozilla Chrome directory structure.
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However, un-jarring the Netscape 6 chrome and skin directories and files and then re-jarring them is another story. So for now, even if you are more interested in making a customized Netscape 6 skin, please use the Mozilla 17 November Mtrunk build or download and use the 24 December Mtrunk build and follow along with skinning that Mozilla build rather than trying to do this tutorial with Netscape 6.
In a later article we will show you how to un-jar and re-jar the Netscape 6 browser-suite chrome and skins directories and files. Then, you can apply what you learn here to customizing Netscape 6 skins.
