Joe writes:
XAML is an OPEN LANGUAGE. It is XML COMPLIANT. How many times do I have to say it?
If any portion of it is patented, and the license for any of those patents puts restrictions on what license you can use, it's not open. The fact that you can find out what the tags do doesn't make it open.
Joe Marini also comments on Netscape XUL/Mozilla XUL. Joe writes:
I’ve been in this business for FIFTEEN years. Let me tell you a secret: most of your “open standards” today started out as somebody’s attempt to create a proprietary technology that failed. Mozilla XUL started out as Netscape XUL, which was a PROPRIETARY invention intended originally only to run inside the Netscape browser and thus create Navigator lock-in. I know this because, see, I actually TALKED with Netscape AT LENGTH about this way back when I was on Dreamweaver and they wanted us to provide support for it.
JavaScript ALSO started out as a PROPRIETARY Netscape invention, and was in fact called LiveScript originally until they decided to try and piggy-back off of Java’s momentum and renamed it JavaScript.
I don't see this guy's point. We're supposed to look down on standards because some of them were once proprietary?
Furthermore, what about SVG, XForms and other web standards? What's the rationale for leaving them out?
Both of these technologies only became “open” when the business cases for keeping them closed collapsed, not because of any altruism on the part of the developers.
So what he's saying is that XAML is only "open" because they have a business-related reason for doing so.
CSS is nice for web pages, but the fact is that from an architectural viewpoint, it has so many structural problems that need addressing. You can’t extend it. It’s not compositional. I could go on and on.
Why not go on and on via www-style so that those problems get fixed?
Furthermore, where's your reasoning for not supporting SVG, XForms, XBL (which is a W3C note as 1.0 and a W3C working draft as 2.0), RDF, and a host of other technologies?
XAML is XML. PERIOD. We could have used a format that wasn’t an open W3C spec-compliant one, but we didn’t. It was important to us that we base it on an open W3C standard.
Here he's trying to convince us that Microsoft is somehow being generous by basing XAML on XML. (I've heard that XAML actually deviates from XML in a few minor ways, but not being an expert on that, I'll refrain from arguing that for the time being.) The simple fact of the matter is that Microsoft only gains from using XML. It creates the illusion of cooperating with the standards community while leveraging Microsoft's existing investment in XML and its XML parser. It also makes it easier for third parties to create tools that can edit XAML.
At the same time, XAML's reliance on proprietary tags and exclusion of W3C technologies ensures that developers of an actual implementation of XAML (as opposed to just an editor that uses Avalon for rendering) will be unable to reuse existing source code form such W3C technologies in their implementations. This means that an XAML implementation will be as difficult as implementing the Win32 APIs. Thus, Microsoft ensures that few people are willing to put forth the effort to clone XAML on other platforms.
Do you agree with Microsoftie Joe Marini that MSXAML is an open language by the virtue that it's encoded in XML?
Nope.
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