Date: May 9, 2006 11:18:46 AM PDT
Subject: possible XUL direction, as per Ben's blog
Most of XUL's layout primitives should be factored out into a CSS extension that can be used by any markup language, especially HTML. This would be very useful for Web developers.
and
Some XUL widgets we should move over to HTML to implement Web Forms 2, and XBL-bind them back to XUL.
It strikes me that these things are both pointing back to benefits of the network effect: anytime we can push standards that are available in multiple browsers, we get a bunch of stuff for free from the web community at large: documentation, development environment support, and a much larger community of potential contributors with the right skill set. Our uses of CSS and JS in combination with XUL are great examples of this, and we get plenty of patches and even some core contributors who got involved because the barrier to entry was so low.
This suggests to me (naively) that a slightly different path for XUL might be worth investigating: spend more time on our compound document story, and instead of trying to XULify everything, spend the effort on HTML widgetry and use that mixed in with XUL where appropriate.
Dan
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