Hi,
To promote his upcoming 800-page XUL Thriller
("Rapid Application Development with Mozilla")
arriving in bookstores any minute now Nigel McFarlane
has written an article titled "An Introductory Tour of
Mozilla's XUL" for the informIT site.
The article's contents includes:
* Introduction
* XUL Is XML
* XUL Does Easily What XHTML Does Clumsily
* XUL GUI Construction Goes Beyond Forms
* The Template Factor
* Over the XUL Rainbow
* Conclusion
To kick off the article Nigel asks:
Developing web applications, but fed up with bending
HTML? Too busy to learn .NET? Be cool, use XUL
(pronounced "zool").
To see that Nigel has-been-there-and-done-that allow
me to quote some highlights:
In the "XUL Is XML" section Nigel writes:
Before XML, expressing a software GUI required either
a "canned" approach, in which a GUI design tool does
all the work for you, or a heap of code written in
some programming language. XUL uses neither of these
strategies. Instead, each widget in the GUI is
declared with one or more XUL tags, a strategy
identical to that of HTML. For GUIs, this is an
efficient and groundbreaking way to do software
development. XUL is also designed so the same code
will work across all platforms. Thus, your XUL
document will display correctly on Microsoft Windows,
Macintosh, and Linux.
In the "XUL Does Easily What XHTML Does Clumsily"
section Nigel writes:
A serious problem with traditional web-based
applications is the way in which they abuse HTML. The
HTML standard is designed for display of hypertext
documents—documents containing links to other
documents. The form-like aspects of HTML have nothing
to do with hypertext; they exist in the HTML standards
merely because they're too useful to leave out.
Web-based applications try to make HTML pages look
more like a paper form than like a hypertext document.
This is a perversion of HTML's original purpose.
XUL is a language for expressing forms away from the
hypertext environment. Stripped of the underlying
hypertext requirement, XUL is able to offer more
flexible form-construction options, as well as
everything that HTML offers the form builder. This
table shows that XUL can do everything that HTML's
form and menu tags can do.
In the "XUL GUI Construction Goes Beyond Forms"
section Nigel writes:
If XUL was just form scripts and styles, you might
as well stick with HTML. But XUL is more than forms;
it's a whole supermarket shelf of GUI tricks. Here's a
shopping cart of GUI widgets to sample from:
* To put GUI elements on top of each other, use a
<stack>, a <deck>, a <bulletinboard>, a <tabbox>, or a
<wizard>.
* If you don't like the standard button provided
by <button>, use the type attribute to vary it a
number of ways, or use any of these other button-like
tags: <toolbarbutton>, <autorepeatbutton>,
<scrollbarbutton>, <grippy>, <toolbargrippy>,
<resizer>.
* To add support for a keystroke, use the <key>
tag or the <command> tag.
* To work with menus, try <menu>, <menulist>,
<menupopup>, or <menubar>.
* To add scrolling, use the CSS overflow property,
or the XUL <scrollbox>, <arrowscrollbox>, or
<scrollbar> tag.
* Toolbars and menu bars can be added to a window
using the <toolbox>, <toolbar>, <menubar>, and
<statusbar> tags as starting points for any other tag.
* XUL even has <colorpicker> and <progressmeter>
tags.
And so and and so forth.
Full story @
http://www.informit.com/isapi/product_id~{92C103A7-1542-4126-8597-21F3B35EE5B0}/content/index.asp
- Gerald
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