In reply to Marc's comments replying to Arron's comments, replying to Marc's comments:
I think really that there are two main reasons why the XUL Open source/GPL effort is taking so long to bake: 1.) With Open source/GPL projects many people can make projects, many people can run with a derivative and run with a derivative of a derivative - case in point Linux ... Debian, Redhat, Lindows, etc. Efforts and resources scatter, kind of like an easter egg hunt spreads out. A business is more like paramilitary invading. They go in, destroy, and get out as quick as possible. 2.) I think XUL in itself is not addressing the whole need. Yes, we need an XML-based UI, yes we need an API to do this in, but we also need a framework that will support all of the rest of things for that application as well. For example, in Java and C# there are tonnes of API calls to do all sorts of neat stuff like DB connections, sockets, XML, 2D, 3D, sound, COM, DCOM, CORBA, etc. XUL and a XUL API do not have this. I think that the only thing M$ has brought to the table is the idea that a XUL needs to be supported in a larger context. Programming these days is not the same it was 10 years ago. Remember using Borland's C++ Builder in Win 3.1? You wrote your application and hoped that you could find the winsock stack? Sound and video API calls were unheard of. These days programmers expect (and rightly so) a rich set of tools to use. Sun really started addressing this with the Java platform. It has all kinds of APIs. Makes programmers drool (more than usual) over API calls. Even the C++ programmers got jealous and at GNU came up with CommonC++ to create a default class hierarchy that looks suspiciously like the Java world. But then again the Java class hierarchy looks suspiciously like the Delphi class hierarchy, and so on ... Many other efforts have been made (in other platforms) to address pieces of this but there hasn't been a "final unifier" ... until now with .NET and XAML ... so long as you play in the windoze world. This is the edge that billy boy and the programming monkeys at M$ have over Mozilla. Unification. I don't know, maybe the next step is an XML programming language that transparently ties all programming platforms together so that you never know if it's compiled down to C++, C#, Java, whatever. Definitely a first step would be to tie XUL/XBL in with Gnome an SVG lib and see where it goes from there. Then add an XML programming language and ... my 2 cents. Arron NHS^隊X'uS+l.)ۭޱy zThm'^֧t!:(!h'-櫝ޯ+ax wZj[-̬vhkjبmv,vw(xF"w~\'$mjY&j)b bn֥X( ~zwilqzlX)ߣn֥
