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wsg members thought of it and maybe if they could give me some background or forecast regarding the tech, will it be superseded, is it still in development, etc.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]
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