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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@metalab.unc.edu
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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