[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 10:50 AM -0500 10/28/03, Gerald Bauer wrote: > Well, my point was that Microsoft doesn't care about >standards and blissfully ignores CSS and reinvents the >wheel to take full control. Windows is more than an OS,. It's an OS and a GUI and an API. I suspect Microsoft sees the GUI and API as core to what they do. I can't imagine they'd give up control of this, any more than GM would adopt an industry standard engine. This is why Microsoft freaked out over Java and over Netscape. They could see the GUI and API slipping away from them. I also suspect that as one of the few players able to promulgate a GUI and an API, they can't see limiting themselves to be part of the community. If you're a small fish who can't afford to design and market your own GUI and API it may make sense to compromise with others. However, if you are capable of going it alone, you'll have much more control. You'll be able to accomplish much more than you could by adopting third party components. > As far as I know in SVG you can use either CSS style >properties or full-blown XML attributes. It depends on the specific CSS property, but in general, yes, you can. However, because both are allowed software has to handle both. You cannot rely on the data being in the easier to handle XML attribute form. > As far as XUL goes it's all in flux and adding >full-blown XML attributes in addition to CSS style >properties is just syntatic sugar and convenience and >thus easy to addon. It's easy to add on. It's not easy to process. Adding multiple ways of encoding the same information makes the system more complicated, not less. Syntax sugar leads to code decay. Four out of five dentists surveyed recommend sugar-free code for their patients who chew code. It would be better to have just the CSS style attribute in XUL than to have both the style attribute and individual attributes like background and font-weight. It would be better not to have the style attribute at all and just have the individual attributes. As Simon and Eric point out, it might be best not to have styles in the main document at all. > Well, XUL already supports strutured labels that use >XHTML for rich text and not some new markup language >resembling XHTML. > > For example: > > <button> > <label><b>Hello</b></label> > </button> > > Is perfectly legal in XUL > > in XAML it's > > <button> > <bold>Hello</bold> > </button> Excellent! This is keeping with Item 23, Reuse XHTML for generic narrative content. A point in XUL's favor. Your original example did not make this clear. > Well, I wouldn't say that reinventing CSS, XHTML, XUL >and SVG is the right thing to do. I see no evidence they're reinventing CSS or SVG. What have they done here that bothers you? > The main point of XML is interoperability as far as >I know. If you tell the world my way or the highway >how is this true to the XML charter? And the syntax vs. semantics thread rears its head again! I do not believe that interoperability requires standardizing one single vocabulary for a given domain. I'd be very surprised if XUL plausibly met Microosft's needs. I suspect they have their own unique, local requirements which they need their own application to handle. I think other non-Microsoft systems will need to transform the XAML data into their own local semantics. This won't be too hard to do as long as XAML uses XML as its basic syntax. Similarly, XUL documents will also need to be transformed to meet the needs of other applications that consume XUL data. However, it is much easier for me with my unique local needs to process XAML data than it is to process XUL data because XAML uses XML syntax and XUL uses XML+CSS. -- Elliotte Rusty Harold elharo@m... Effective XML (Addison-Wesley, 2003) http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/effectivexml http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0321150406/ref%3Dnosim/cafeaulaitA
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