[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Microsoft Hypes Up XUL As The Greatest ExpirimentSince Ada
At 7:49 PM -0500 10/27/03, Gerald Bauer wrote: > Now let's look what a button looks like in the >"revolutionary" Microsoft XAML thingy: > > <Button Background="LightSeaGreen" FontSize="24pt"> > Calculate > </Button> > > Whow. Compared to the XUL version: > > <button label="Calculate" style="background: >lightSeaGreen; font-size: 24pt" /> Hmm. To me it looks like XAML is considerably better designed than XUL. This is very much like the difference between SVG and XSL-FO that I wrote about in Item 11 of Effective XML, Make structure explicit through markup. XUL is using a double syntax with embedded CSS. The syntax should be XML, even if the semantics come from CSS. XAML and XSL-FO get this right. XUL and SVG get this wrong. I've now put that chapter online: http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/effectivexml/chapters/11.html I think someone asked if it would be possible to write an XSLT stylesheet to convert from XAML to XUL. One consequence of XUL's design is that it is much easier to write a stylesheet to go from XAML to XUL than from XUL to XAML. XAML-->XUL is straightforward because all the important XAML structures are marked up in XML. XUL-->XAML requires writing a CSS parser in XSLT, doable but ugly and hard. The use of a potentially structured label is also a decided improvement in XAML, as I wrote about in Item 12 of Effective XML, Store metadata in attributes. XUL's approach is decidedly limited. It can't easily be extended to make a label anything other than plain text. I've put that chapter online too: http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/effectivexml/chapters/12.html Of course, I'm basing all of this on just one example, so it's possible there are other issues here. And XAML may be making mistakes too. Petzold's article suggests that it's misusing CDATA sections in violation of Item 15, Build on top of structures, not syntax. "Any programming code in an XAML file must be enclosed in a CDATA section. " However, there I strongly suspect it's just Petzold's inexperience with markup causing him to make false statements rather than an underlying problem with XAML. Either way, this is an instructive example of the right and wrong way to use markup. For a change, it looks like Microsoft is the one doing it right. -- Elliotte Rusty Harold elharo@m... Processing XML with Java (Addison-Wesley, 2002) http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xmljava http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0201771861/cafeaulaitA
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