What Doesn't Work

Today I've found out what doesn't work:
 
    Using a hidden iframe to open the URL and this get its windowContents property, transferring that onto a canvas, does not work. Even though Mozilla says it should . Odd, isn't it?

    Once the URL is loaded, prior to its information being inserted into my database, saving the windowContents to a canvas then converting that to a string - its base 64 representation - to be inserted into a database does not work. I think the problem is that inserting a string with nearly 10,000 characters may be pushing SQLite. I'm not 100% sure if this is the problem though, since the only notification I get is a catastrophic error message with the only relevant information being the line and NS_ERROR_COMPONENT_FAILURE which, lets face it, doesn't tell me much.
 
    So currently thumbnails are a bit beyond my grasp, but during the meeting today I was given a great suggestion to use for now; instead of a thumbnail - use the favicon icon (I'm sorry, I forget what the name of the girl who suggested it!). I predict that this will work well, simply because I can query the SQLite database that Mozilla has for storing history related information though the moz_favicon table. The table has a reference to the URLs of the favicon icons. There are two issues I need to solve:

    How do I tie each URL to the appropriate favicon URL?

    I think I'll try to link them by querying the moz_favicon table. When a URL is being added to my URL table, query the moz_favicon database table with a regular expression containing the websites URL then add that URL as another column in my url table. However, it can't be the exact URL that I query the database with - that won't be in the moz_favicon table - so I have to instead get the relevant portion. I could possibly search from the beginning of the string to .com OR .ca OR .org OR...every possible domain. This isn't pretty, but it should work, in theory. Then I have to ensure that the favicon is indeed stored there. Unfortunately I have already ran into a site which has it stored at some obscure location; the Google favicon for some site I've visited was stored at http://www.gstatic.com/news/img/favicon.ico (found through a SQLite database manager extension), clearly the domain does not begin with google.com or google.ca. I think I'll try this route anyway, since its the only reasonable idea I can come up with. My other option would be to parse each website's HTML code and find a link tag which has rel="icon" or rel="icon shortcut", the two most prevalent tags used for linking the favicon. Once I found the proper link> tag I just insert its href attribute. What I don't like about this approach is that I'm relying on the website's coder to be tidy; I'm relying on them giving the tag an appropriate rel attribute (according to Wikipedia). 
  I'll take it one step at a time:
  Step 1 - Use a placeholder/dummy image but just try to build the graph of a session.
  Step 2 - Replace placeholder image with the favicon image of that site; this shouldn't require too much alterations if I can do Step 1.
  Step 3 - Generate thumbnails for the nodes. This step I might not get to, unfortunately, but I'd really REALLY like to. If I'm not able to implement this during this summer it makes for a good starting point for future enhancements to my extension.
   
    Does every site have a favicon image?

    There is some standardization for file formats for favicon images and such, but I'm not sure if they're mandatory. I think I'll create a dummy image if my basic queries can't find the URL, until I research this question further and get a definite answer.
  
 Since I now know how I'll approach the thumbnail issue (instead of flailing around with canvas examples and stumbling through documentation) what I want to do is choose a library to do the graphing of the data. Once I have this I can start doing simple tests to make sure my code works, and then really start making progress. The use of favicons makes it easier to choose, since they're direct URLs to the images I can use JSViz or, as Ainsley showed me to, Graph Gear  - both offers nice graphs and use URLs for the images. But this got me thinking. If I go in this direction the whole meat of this extension will be tied to using URLs for the graph nodes. This is good for my use, favicons, but once it gets upgraded to use thumbnail images the code would have to be reworked quite a bit. Most extensions that have anything to do with thumbnails render them with canvas'. This is doable but it takes a lot of time to wrap my head around how exactly they're going about it - how they're saving the data without actually saving an image. Should I be concerned with this? Tomorrow I'll ask Steve about this. I know it would be possible to save them all to the users local hard drive - but would people be comfortable with that? Once I have a working prototype I'll have to find some testers willing to critique it.