Gerald Bauer
2005-05-11 17:53:03 UTC
Hello,
John Gossman (Microsoft) writes in the blog story titled "XAML comments by Mr. Clifton":
His comments are right on, a sensible end note to the more confrontationl tone of the
thread he refers to. We struggled for a long time over somewhat conflicting visions of
XAML: as a declarative UI programming language, as a more general serialization
mechanism, or as a document format. Simiilarly we agonized over whether to be
optimized for hand or machine processing. It still isn't completely over: I was talking to
customers recently and a debate broke out over whether XAML should even be human
readable, in particular over whether a designer should ever show it. A show of hands
found half of the room felt it was mandatory that XAML be displayed by the designer, and
half were vehemently against ever looking at the stuff.
At the end of the day, XAML is just a tool. You can program Avalon just fine from the
language of your choice (Python anyone?) and never see XAML. You can write your own
declarative mechanism, and if you want to use CSS, go ahead. The language wars having
been going on at least since Lisp and Fortran, and I don't have any reason to believe XAML
will be any less controversial. At best, it will be a fraction as successful as those two
greybeards.
The current version of XAML (which Marc hasn't seen yet...its coming with the next CTP),
leans much more towards being a general serialization mechanism suitable for machine
processing. As he suggests, we could have gone another direction and been much more
independent of the underlying object model and much more optimized for UI design by
humans. That would be a different language though...and frankly, it's still waiting to be
implemented.
Source: http://blogs.msdn.com/johngossman/archive/2005/04/30/413754.aspx
Any thoughts? Any comments?
- Gerald
_________________________________________
United XAML | http://unitedxaml.org
XAML Forum & News | http://xamlnews.com
John Gossman (Microsoft) writes in the blog story titled "XAML comments by Mr. Clifton":
His comments are right on, a sensible end note to the more confrontationl tone of the
thread he refers to. We struggled for a long time over somewhat conflicting visions of
XAML: as a declarative UI programming language, as a more general serialization
mechanism, or as a document format. Simiilarly we agonized over whether to be
optimized for hand or machine processing. It still isn't completely over: I was talking to
customers recently and a debate broke out over whether XAML should even be human
readable, in particular over whether a designer should ever show it. A show of hands
found half of the room felt it was mandatory that XAML be displayed by the designer, and
half were vehemently against ever looking at the stuff.
At the end of the day, XAML is just a tool. You can program Avalon just fine from the
language of your choice (Python anyone?) and never see XAML. You can write your own
declarative mechanism, and if you want to use CSS, go ahead. The language wars having
been going on at least since Lisp and Fortran, and I don't have any reason to believe XAML
will be any less controversial. At best, it will be a fraction as successful as those two
greybeards.
The current version of XAML (which Marc hasn't seen yet...its coming with the next CTP),
leans much more towards being a general serialization mechanism suitable for machine
processing. As he suggests, we could have gone another direction and been much more
independent of the underlying object model and much more optimized for UI design by
humans. That would be a different language though...and frankly, it's still waiting to be
implemented.
Source: http://blogs.msdn.com/johngossman/archive/2005/04/30/413754.aspx
Any thoughts? Any comments?
- Gerald
_________________________________________
United XAML | http://unitedxaml.org
XAML Forum & News | http://xamlnews.com