Miguel de Icaza (Mono Chief) and Brendan Eich (Mozilla Chief) On MS-XAML/Avalon

[Gerald Bauer]

Hello,

InfoWorld has published a short interview of Miguel de Icaza (Mono
Chief) and Brendan Eich (Mozilla Chief) about Avalon/MS-XAML.

Miguel de Icaza: Avalon is a very extensive API, but while there is
a lot of abstraction, there is not enough encapsulation. It's a
high-level standard toolkit. The problem we have today with Unix
toolkits, Mac OS toolkits, and Windows toolkits is that we are still
using the same controls. Developers and designers are building
applications in terms of the following items: scroll bars, enter
lines, buttons, text entries, radio buttons, pop-up menus, combo
boxes. Avalon is not presenting us with new controls or innovative
ways of dealing with large volumes of data. And yet this massive API
says you have to be completely bound to a particular version of the
.Net Framework. This is not the approach the Web has taken, which is
that a table or button can be rendered in different ways appropriate
to the platform.

Brendan Eich: That's right. If you look at XAML's style language,
they really muddle the presentation/structure separation.

...

Q: It's been argued that because there are 15 ways people have
approached XUL [Extensible User Interface Language], Flex, XAML,
whatever -- and you can't reconcile them -- maybe it's time for a de
facto standard implementation.

Brendan Eich: XAML is not that thing, though, because, as Miguel
says, they've bound it too tightly to their class structure. And that
surprises me because they should have institutional memory of all the
versions of OLE and all the hell they had to go through in terms of
compatibility glue. Do they want to do that again?

Source:
http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/07/16/29FElonghornreich_1.html

- Gerald

-------------------
Gerald Bauer

XUL Alliance | http://xul.sourceforge.net
United XAML | http://xaml.sourceforge.net

Interested in hiring Gerald Bauer? Yes, I'm available.
If you know of an opportunity, please contact me today.




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[marc_clifton2000]

Yeah, I read that a few days ago, and the last line struck me as odd:

"XAML is not that thing, though, because, as Miguel says, they've
bound it too tightly to their class structure."

There's something here that I'm confused about. My understanding is
that Microsoft implemented a general parser engine and then some
custom stuff for visual trees, compound notation, etc. I come to
that conclusion because of my understanding of how the namespace
mapping works, and that in theory you should be able to plug in any
assembly and use it.

Now, given that assumption, the sentence about being too tightly
bound to their class structure doesn't make any sense. XAML can
work with ANY class structure, supposedly, not just Avalon. Now, of
course, there ARE specific things about the parser, in my
understanding, like how styles and visual trees work, but that's
only a part of puzzle. What the above quote implies is a coupling
that would prevent XAML from working with anything other than
Microsoft's Avalon class structure, which I don't think is the case.

Anyone care to enlighten me on this? Or does Miguel and Brendan not
know what they're talking about?

Marc



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[Gerald Bauer]

Hello,

Post by marc_clifton2000
Anyone care to enlighten me on this? Or does Miguel and Brendan not
know what they're talking about?

Ok let me try how I understand Miguel's and Brendan's comments. I
think Brendan's point is that there is no such thing as a well-defined
XAML format (e.g. like HTML). When you use MS-XAML you are always
bound to the underlying API. Of course, that's excactly what Microsoft
wants to get you locked in. Also the Avalon API is a monster on
purpose so you can't clone it without spending a billion or two.

The web architecture in contrast is different. A REST-style stresses
document formats instead of APIs and also stress universal human
readable addresses (e.g. URL) and so on.

Also one strength of HTML is that it is fault tolerant and thus you
can add attributes or tags as you please and they just get ignored. In
contrast, as far as I understand MS-XAML, if you use tags or
attributes that don't match the Windows API or Windows class structure
you will get compile time errors and thus Microsoft can break
compatibility as they please and gently force you to upgrade as they
do know.

- Gerald

-------------------
Gerald Bauer

XUL Alliance | http://xul.sourceforge.net
United XAML | http://xaml.sourceforge.net

Interested in hiring Gerald Bauer? Yes, I'm available.
If you know of an opportunity, please contact me today.



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