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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?
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