RE: [WSG] WSG thoghts on XUL
Dean Jackson [snip] I don't think it's beyond the scope of the W3C. We're constantly looking at technologies like XUL. Do people see the need for standardisation in this area? I'd welcome some standardisation, but as John Allsopp already mentioned, MS went the XAML route...so once again, any standardisation work done on the XUL end will only mirror, or run in parallel to, the MS way. The only saving grace (although I'm not sure of the practicality) would be that both XUL and XAML are XML based, and could - in theory anyway - be transformed from one to the other in a hopefully straightforward way. Patrick Patrick H. Lauke Webmaster / University of Salford http://www.salford.ac.uk ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
Re: [WSG] WSG thoghts on XUL
John,
On 22 Feb 2005, at 15:42, John Allsopp wrote:
I don't think it's beyond the scope of the W3C. We're constantly
looking
at technologies like XUL. Do people see the need for standardisation
in this area?
Sure.
I think the real benefit of standardisation and standards bodies is
not necessarily the standards they develop (in a sense, it's not even
necessary, and arguably not even advisable they develop those
standards, at least not from top to bottom) but that by anointing
technology it becomes a common good.
Agreed. It seems to be a fairly common discussion topic nowadays as to
whether or not a standards body should be generally creating or
generally adopting. My take is it depends.
The alternative is industry standards that is winner takes all
proprietary technologies, which are the property and strategic asset
of their creator.
XUL/XAML is a very good example of this. XUL was developed at Mozilla,
whose implementation was a great proof of concept. It's a shame that
early on in its development Mozilla didn't take it to WC
By this you mean flush it down the toilet? ;)
and say, look here is this really cool technology that works, would
you guys like to work with us to standardize this?
Or maybe they did and I don't know about it.
As far as I know, XUL was never a submission to W3C. I know a lot of
W3C Groups have considered work in the general area (including XForms
and SVG, and obviously CSS has been thinking about UI). In the cases
I'm aware of we were hesitant to start down the road of defining a UI
toolkit (we'd heard many horror stories of how much effort it is to
complete such a task).
However, maybe we were wrong? Maybe XUL is a comfortable sweet spot?
Unfortunately now we have two competing technologies that are similar,
leading to years if not decades in the delay of the adoption of XUL
like solutions.
Interesting that you think the appearance of XAML will have an effect
on XUL adoption, since XUL has been around for so long. I'm not saying
that I think it won't delay adoption, just that I don't know :)
I'm hoping that the fact that proprietary Web Application technologies
such as XAML and Flash are getting more attention means that we are
approaching the point where we could think about standardisation in
this area. I also think it's so broad a field that we shouldn't think
that one size will fit all. That's like saying you should only ever use
C++. However, XUL may be a great start.
Just as an aside why
circle and not solid class=whatever
.whatever {shape: circle}
This is a good question. The reason is that you still have to define
all the properties of the circle (eg. radius). This could certainly be
done via CSS:
.whatever {display: circle; radius: 10cm} // note I used display
because
// I think it's a better
match
This seems ok for circle (CSS x,y could be used to position). However,
what about a general polygon, or an arbitrary shape?
.whatever {display: polygon; points: 10,20 23,23 . }
You'd end up inventing a bunch of properties for the many structural
attributes. As these can be quite complicated, it means your CSS
parser would require a whole set of additional micro-parsers.
In the end I think you'd come to the conclusion that CSS is a pretty
good technology for styling HTML, an acceptable technology for laying-
out HTML, and probably not the right technology for displaying arbitrary
content as graphics or very complex text.
Furthermore, just as a h1 in HTML is always a heading, a circle
in SVG is always a circle. Having just a solid element and using
CSS is similar to having only div in HTML (with display: heading1).
Are we off topic?
Dean
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Re: [WSG] WSG thoghts on XUL
On 22 Feb 2005, at 21:07, Patrick Lauke wrote: Dean Jackson [snip] I don't think it's beyond the scope of the W3C. We're constantly looking at technologies like XUL. Do people see the need for standardisation in this area? I'd welcome some standardisation, but as John Allsopp already mentioned, MS went the XAML route...so once again, any standardisation work done on the XUL end will only mirror, or run in parallel to, the MS way. XUL is a much smaller technology than XAML. It's so much smaller that I doubt it will mirror the MS route. It also isn't really a competitor to XAML. It's the combination of technologies (XUL, XBL, HTML, CSS, Javascript, SVG, etc) that provide an Open alternative. The good news is that enough of this platform exists today, enabling a bunch of fantastic Web Applications. It is also an evolutionary approach. The only saving grace (although I'm not sure of the practicality) would be that both XUL and XAML are XML based, and could - in theory anyway - be transformed from one to the other in a hopefully straightforward way. XAML is an XML serialisation of the Windows object hierarchy (which you could think of as the Win32 or .NET API). This isn't strictly true, but I think it's close enough to make the point, which is.. Basically, XAML is tied to Windows. It is conceivable that you could implement XAML on another platform, just as the Mono project is implementing .NET. However, some pieces of the technology will be extremely hard to replicate, and some may be covered by patents. There's also the code embedded in XAML files (e.g. C# or ASP) that is (typically) Windows specific. Therefore, I doubt you'll be using the fact that both are XML to transform between one and the other. I know of people that have transformed between XAML and other formats, but this is mostly for static images, not applications. As always though, I certainly could be wrong! Dean -- dean jackson world wide web consortium (w3c) - http://www.w3.org/ mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
RE: [WSG] WSG thoghts on XUL
Dean Jackson XUL is a much smaller technology than XAML. [...] I doubt you'll be using the fact that both are XML to transform between one and the other. Fair enough. I'll admit to not really knowing too much about XAML, hence my naive generalistation (or wishful thinking really). Thanks for giving a more rounded view on the subject, Dean. Patrick Patrick H. Lauke Webmaster / University of Salford http://www.salford.ac.uk ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
Re: [WSG] WSG thoghts on XUL
Jixor - Stephen I wrote: I have previously encountered XUL but only just started to look into it. I have found it so far (only worked with it for one day) to be really interesting. I was wondering what other wsg members thought of it and maybe if they could give me some background or forecast regarding the tech, will it be superseded, is it still in development, etc. What I found most interesting is the fact that there is a lot of XUL markup which is squarely presentational in nature. After a long time striving for semantic XHTML markup with separate presentation in CSS, it feels like a huge step backwards being expected to mix it around like it's 1996 again. I try to make a point of personal discipline to apply the same strict sense of separation of content and presentation in my XUL, as if it was any other standards-based web site. However, I fear this topic is beyond the scope of the web standards list (as it's, of course, not a W3C standard), so I think I'll leave it at that now... -- Patrick H. Lauke _ re·dux (adj.): brought back; returned. used postpositively [latin : re-, re- + dux, leader; see duke.] www.splintered.co.uk | www.photographia.co.uk http://redux.deviantart.com ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
Re: [WSG] WSG thoghts on XUL
Patrick H. Lauke wrote: Jixor - Stephen I wrote: I have previously encountered XUL but only just started to look into it. I have found it so far (only worked with it for one day) to be really interesting. I was wondering what other wsg members thought of it and maybe if they could give me some background or forecast regarding the tech, will it be superseded, is it still in development, etc. What I found most interesting is the fact that there is a lot of XUL markup which is squarely presentational in nature. After a long time striving for semantic XHTML markup with separate presentation in CSS, it feels like a huge step backwards being expected to mix it around like it's 1996 again. I try to make a point of personal discipline to apply the same strict sense of separation of content and presentation in my XUL, as if it was any other standards-based web site. However, I fear this topic is beyond the scope of the web standards list (as it's, of course, not a W3C standard), so I think I'll leave it at that now... Yep, that has been my main problem with it also. However I don't consider it as much of an issue as for html design. The XUL is for describing the application interface not styling it. Of course due to shortcomings of its css implementation there seems to be many things that you can only do by applying properties to the tags themselves. That said its not like they can't just add properties to the css standard. ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
Re: [WSG] WSG thoghts on XUL
On 22 Feb 2005, at 11:34, Patrick H. Lauke wrote: Jixor - Stephen I wrote: I have previously encountered XUL but only just started to look into it. I have found it so far (only worked with it for one day) to be really interesting. I was wondering what other wsg members thought of it and maybe if they could give me some background or forecast regarding the tech, will it be superseded, is it still in development, etc. What I found most interesting is the fact that there is a lot of XUL markup which is squarely presentational in nature. After a long time striving for semantic XHTML markup with separate presentation in CSS, it feels like a huge step backwards being expected to mix it around like it's 1996 again. I try to make a point of personal discipline to apply the same strict sense of separation of content and presentation in my XUL, as if it was any other standards-based web site. I think it is worth considering that not all markup languages are able to separate presentation from content. Some markup languages are purely presentational in nature. One example is SVG, which can be styled via CSS, but that is only manipulating the presentational properties -- CSS can't turn a circle into a rect. Other examples are XSL:FO and MathML (to some degree). I think XUL falls mostly into this camp. I would assume that many people's gut reaction is WTF!?!, especially after the long, hard battle to get people to use CSS properly with HTML. This is probably a valid reaction, but I believe presentational markup languages are unavoidable. However, it's not all that bad. We're looking at technologies like XBL to transform a semantically rich markup into a presentational system. In the same way as CSS decorates an HTML tree with presentational information, XBL could decorate an XML tree with presentation and behaviour. This allows the author to use the highest level language available (eg. higher than HTML which isn't terribly semantically rich). However, I fear this topic is beyond the scope of the web standards list (as it's, of course, not a W3C standard), so I think I'll leave it at that now... I don't think it's beyond the scope of the W3C. We're constantly looking at technologies like XUL. Do people see the need for standardisation in this area? Dean -- dean jackson world wide web consortium (w3c) - http://www.w3.org/ mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
Re: [WSG] WSG thoghts on XUL
Dean,
I don't think it's beyond the scope of the W3C. We're constantly
looking
at technologies like XUL. Do people see the need for standardisation
in this area?
Sure.
I think the real benefit of standardisation and standards bodies is not
necessarily the standards they develop (in a sense, it's not even
necessary, and arguably not even advisable they develop those
standards, at least not from top to bottom) but that by anointing
technology it becomes a common good. The alternative is industry
standards that is winner takes all proprietary technologies, which are
the property and strategic asset of their creator.
XUL/XAML is a very good example of this. XUL was developed at Mozilla,
whose implementation was a great proof of concept. It's a shame that
early on in its development Mozilla didn't take it to WC and say, look
here is this really cool technology that works, would you guys like to
work with us to standardize this?
Or maybe they did and I don't know about it.
Unfortunately now we have two competing technologies that are similar,
leading to years if not decades in the delay of the adoption of XUL
like solutions.
Just as an aside why
circle and not solid class=whatever
.whatever {shape: circle}
?
j
John Allsopp
:: westciv :: http://www.westciv.com/
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