Zugg Software :: View topic - Microsoft working on its own XUL clone...

Magician Joined: 09 Oct 2003 Posts: 459 Location: USA

http://www.devx.com/webdev/Article/20834

"Microsoft's XAML markup language floats on top of the .NET platform. It is compiled into .NET classes, usually C#, which reduces it to a set of objects. Along with a host of other XML dialects it is an example of a new type of specification for GUIs..."

I figured that this would be a good standard to adopt, as Microsoft will be making it their own form of XML layout files which will be compatible with dot net. Might as well hop on the bandwagon early than try to catch up with it later after you've gone down a different road.

MSDN information concerning the implementation of XAML as part of the OS (code named: Avalon): http://msdn.microsoft.com/longhorn/understanding/pillars/avalon/default.aspx?pull=/msdnmag/issues/04/01/Avalon/default.aspx

A more in depth guide on the XAML language and implementation: http://longhorn.msdn.microsoft.com/?//longhorn.msdn.microsoft.com/lhsdk/port_tools.aspx

I'm sure you can find some other documents about this, but it's almost 3am here and I'm getting tired. Just something to look at.

Posted: Wed May 05, 2004 7:14 pm

Gag.

Sorry, but I'm not a fan of .NET and don't plan to jump on the bandwagon anytime soon. I personally think that even XUL is overkill.

For Zeus, the details of the XML are very simple and I'm trying to make it easier for people, not harder. The names of the tags for user-interface elements match the name of the kind of control you are creating. For example, to make a menu, it looks something like this:

<menu name="Edit">
<item action="Cut"/>
<item action="Copy"/>
<item action="Paste"/>
</menu>

It doesn't need to be more complicated than that. The attributes for a tag coorespond to the Properties of that specific COM object. So, for example, "Top", "Left", "Width", "Height" control the size and position of a control since those are the names of the properties for the Delphi controls.

So, everytime someone uses XML for specifying user-interface controls, there are going to be specifics that depend upon the type of controls that are available. XUL was designed to support the user interface objects available in Mozilla. I'm sure the Microsoft spec will be designed around the user interface and COM objects available in .NET.

But making this general purpose to work with any language and any component set is going to make the spec needlessly complicated for the purposes of what I'm doing.

Sure, Microsoft has to create a spec for this. They need a spec for *everything*. They have hundreds of programmers and without specs and standards they wouldn't be able to do anything. But I'm not going to jump on it just because Microsoft is doing this. I want to keep eMobius simple and efficient.

It's not going to take people very much effort to learn how the user-interface language I'm using works. It would probably take people longer to learn the Microsoft spec. Sure, if I used their standard, then people who were already familiar could write Zeus layouts more easily, but how many people is that going to effect? And people using the Developer's Kit won't even need to care about the XML language being used, so it doesn't effect them at all.

Besides, it's not like the Microsoft standard is going to make it possible to share XML layout files between application development systems. There is no way they are going to have some of the objects and controls that I'm planning for Zeus. All they are going to do is wrap the existing .NET interface headers with an XML language.

Posted: Thu May 06, 2004 11:06 pm

The really wierd thing about this, the more I think about it, is why does Microsoft need a new standard for this anyway? XML is already very general purpose. All I'm doing, for example, is using straight standard XML with my own DTD. I'll even eventually publish the DTD on the web site so people can verify that their layout files are proper and correct.

It's the DTD that defines the valid tag names, attribute names, etc, which essentially defines the names of the user interface components and their properties.

Oh well...nobody said Microsoft made any sense.

Magician Joined: 09 Oct 2003 Posts: 459 Location: USA

I've been going through a lot of content on MSDN, because they actually have content nowadays...

Anyways, they've got an example of their XAML design in

http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdntv/episode.aspx?xml=episodes/en/20031028lhorndb/manifest.xml

using C#. The video is about 55m total, but the important items are in the first 20m of the video.