Hello, allow me to follow-up with two older blog stories from Sam Ruby's (IBM, Atom project lead) blog that also weighs-in on the XAML vs. Serialization debate.
In the first blog story titled "XAML revealed" Sam writes: Don Box: XAML is just an XML-based way to wire up CLR types no more no less... XAML is domain-neutral, so while it may be used to create desktop apps, web pages, and printable documents, it could also be used to create CRM apps, blogging backends, or highly concurrent web services ***provided you had a supporting CLR-based library to do the heavy lifting***. I guess that clears *that* up. More @ http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/1637.html In the second follow up blog story titled "XAML is for humans" Sam writes: Don Box: Today, the data needed to initialize an object graph is hidden behind imperative statements in your programming language of choice. That makes it difficult to tease out of the rest of your program without weird markers in the source code to delimit the structure of your code into recognizable pieces. I buy this part. I don't buy the Man vs Machine angle. If you want to write some queries over this data, the schema had better be understandable by mere humans. And if you want to write a transformation, you had better be prepared to wallow in the instance data, as that's how you will have to debug it. My previous post on this subject had more to it, but I chickened out and didn't post it. What the heck, I could be wrong, but... here's essentially what I said. What I can piece together is that somebody was designing a visual composition editor targeting the traditional VB crowd. And ran into limits in the ability to round trip generated source code that had been modified by humans. Attributes helped, but weren't enough. What was needed was some real structure. So, that person chose to serialize that data separately. Such is not new, other visual composition editors have done this for years. However, given that it is 2003, the choice was made to serialize that data as XML. This too has been done before. Furthermore, I gather that that person wasn't exactly a connoisseur of XML, but merely viewed it as just another data format. However, an inevitable consequence of having chosen an XML format is that the development team will receive a lot of "help" in designing the format. Both from within Microsoft and from the peanut gallery. Whether they want it or not. More @ http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/1642.html What's your tought on markup for humans vs. machines? - Gerald ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by: IBM Linux Tutorials Free Linux tutorial presented by Daniel Robbins, President and CEO of GenToo technologies. Learn everything from fundamentals to system administration.http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=1470&alloc_id=3638&op=click _______________________________________________ xul-talk mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/xul-talk
