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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Mozilla XUL Gurus Dissect Microsoft XUL Knock-Off
 Hi, To add some insight to Microsoft reinvention of HTML, CSS, DOM, XUL, SVG, SMIL, Flash, and PDF upcoming in Longhorn allow me to repost the latest XUL News Wire story titled "Mozilla XUL Gurus Dissect Microsoft XUL Knock-Off" online @ http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.xul.announce/129 Here we go: The blogshere is abuzz as Mozilla XUL gurus inspect Microsoft's latest beast. Joe Hewitt concludes his XAML Thoughts Trilogy: Microsoft may be attempting to simultaneously obsolete HTML, CSS, DOM, XUL, SVG, SMIL, Flash, PDF. At this point, the SDK documentation is too incomplete to firmly judge how well XAML compares with these formats, but I hope this lights a fire under the collective butt of the W3C, Macromedia, and Adobe. In Episode I Joe writes: XAML has equivalent tags for the HTML block/inline layout model (albeit, with much wordier tag names like Paragraph, HyperLink, and LineBreak). However, they also allow us to do multi-column layout, which is one of those no-brainer features that the W3C just dropped on the floor. There are equivalent tags for doing tables, but importantly there is a separate set of tags for doing grids, which make for a much easier way of expressing a simple table-like layout. I like these tags better than XUL's grid tags, because you don't have to wrap each row in another element, you just provide a list and tell it how may columns to split. XAML's "style system" confused me at first, because it bears little resemblance to CSS. Turns out, their style system is really a combination of CSS with Mozilla's XBL, all expressed in XML. A "Style" tag appears to contain an instance of an element such as a button, but in fact this is really a style rule whose tag is like a CSS tag selector, and whose name is like a a CSS class selector. Styles can be forked based on property values, using "PropertyTrigger" tags, which are basically like CSS attribute and pseudoclass selectors. Confusingly, I also found a brief description of something called property sheets, which looks more like the CSS we know and love, but different. Links: * XAML Thoughts, Episode III @ http://www.joehewitt.com/archive.php?month=2003-10#000119 * XAML Thoughts, Episode II @ http://www.joehewitt.com/archive.php?month=2003-10#000118 * XAML Thoughts, Episode I @ http://www.joehewitt.com/archive.php?month=2003-10#000117 Neil Deakin (of XUL Planet fame) wrote a blog story titled "Some XAML comments" and comments: * There's something which falls into the category of 'Yet another XML vector language which isn't SVG.' It does look very similar though, but my cursory glance and limited knowledge of SVG suggest that it isn't the same. It is called Windows Vector Graphics though. Yes, this is exactly what the world needs. More similar but different vector graphics languages. * There is no CSS used -- instead specific attributes are used. There is something confusingly called Styles, which appear to be more like CSS classes for sharing appearance with a number of elements. This Styles feature does seem to have the capability to adjust the appearance of inner content, for example the thumbs and slider part of a scrollbar can be adjusted with a block of XML. In fact, some of the examples suggest that the Style features might have some XBL-like content capability, although it looked more confusing. Links: * Some XAML Comments @ http://www.xulplanet.com/ndeakin/archive/2003/10/27/ Any comments? ______________________________________________________________________ Post your free ad now! http://personals.yahoo.ca 
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