Marc,
I'm surprised too but not by what you found. I'm surprised that you're surprised. To be honest, I'm always floored when those that walk into the M$ dev scene become shocked to find that M$ is putting all kinds of dirty little tricks and manglings into well known/well established standards. Starting from bastardizing SQL, C++, HTML, Java, XML and countless other technologies to simply outright changing things and expecting the world to roll over like a puppy and accept the Borgesque mentality of the M$ empire.
Your project looks really cool guy but I think you're batting for the wrong team. XAML is not meant to add features in the .NET environment: if they were looking at adding features, they would have used SVG, XHTML, XUL (some XUL) or just stuck with PDF. But they don't want that. They are once again trying to take over the entire world and now kill Adobe and kill Macromedia and possibly Mozilla although I'm not entirely convinced that Mozilla is flying within their radar detection.
Not to sound too preachy but you're helping them accomplish this with that fine API of yours.
a.
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I did some investigating, and I wasn't to happy with what I found out. You can read about how Longhorn's XAML makes a mess of markup in my blog:
http://myxaml.com/marcclifton
To summarize:
1. Tag names are not just class names--they can be function calls, class
types, mystery property setters, or have no relationship to the underlying
DOM at all!
2. Implicit collection tags - Longhorn's XAML parser has hidden knowledge of the DOM so that you don't have to use collection tags in your markup
3. Decorators and VisualStyle violate every rule in the XAML book
I think this spells disaster for the idea that XAML (at least Longhorn's
version of it) will be a viable cross-platform serialization syntax.
Suffice it to say, I won't be implementing any of these custom parser hacks in MyXaml.
Marc
http://myxaml.com/marcclifton
To summarize:
1. Tag names are not just class names--they can be function calls, class
types, mystery property setters, or have no relationship to the underlying
DOM at all!
2. Implicit collection tags - Longhorn's XAML parser has hidden knowledge of the DOM so that you don't have to use collection tags in your markup
3. Decorators and VisualStyle violate every rule in the XAML book
I think this spells disaster for the idea that XAML (at least Longhorn's
version of it) will be a viable cross-platform serialization syntax.
Suffice it to say, I won't be implementing any of these custom parser hacks in MyXaml.
Marc
