[xul-talk] Comments on MSXAML story by CSS Zen Garden creator

[Gerald Bauer]

Hello,

allow me to highlight some comments on the "Avalon/XAML First Look" story by CSS Zen Garden creator Dave Shea.

Joe Marini comments:


1. XAML is not “just a XUL ripoff.” XUL is entirely about presentation structure. Yes, XAML contains presentation information, but it goes WAY beyond that and provides a way of specifying not just physical appearance but interactive behavior and abstract object instantiation. It goes a long way toward declarative programming, and provides some very nifty ways of making sure the two stay separate. In fact, I’ve built entire examples of XAML-only functionality that would require a lot of script programming in the past (you can see them on my site).

2. Microsoft is not “ignoring standards like CSS and SVG.” CSS was in fact deeply investigated, and doesn’t have the necessary power or extensibility to accomplish what you can do in XAML. Neither does SVG, which was built and pushed by its creators primarily to be an animation engine. That’s not XAML’s primary mission.

(By the way, I find it highly interesting that Macromedia’s Flash format is closed and propietary and yet nobody complains about that, yet MS went out of its way to make XAML easily extensible via third parties and gets no kudos for it. And please don’t tell me how Macromedia “opened” SWF - they just documented the bytecode. They still control the language and its implementation, and you can’t extend it like you can XAML).

3. XAML is not MS just making another IE-proprietary language to shut out other browsers. Many of you may find this hard to believe, but the ratio of intranet applications to internet apps is somewhere around 10 to 1. For scenarios where you can control the runtime environment, web delivery of Avalon apps makes a lot of sense.



Martin comments:

I noticed you did not mention XAML’s similarity to SVG. In many ways, its an inferior rip of SVG.

XAML is nothing more than what you stated about lock-in. Instead of following an open standard ( SVG ), Microsoft can’t give up its nasty old ways of going their own way and trying to use its ponderous inertia of users as a fulcrum against the rest of us.

Welcome to the new “browser wars” except the fate of the web itself is now at stake as it moves toward a truly dynamic medium.

It’s the same old sad, stupid story of greed and conquest.

Source: http://www.mezzoblue.com/archives/2005/04/14/avalonxaml_f/comments

- Gerald