I kind of want Python to have a desktop / web neutral library that does this and always am annoyed to learn it does not exist.
Do folks understand why?
XMLUI
101–110 of 345 posts
Re: XMLUI
#102Seems like we keep reinventing the wheel - the previous version of of HTML, XHTML ( eXtensible HyperText Markup Language ) is a direct subset of XML. Also, related - Mozilla Firefox used to have something called XUL ( XML User Interface Language - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XUL - using which you could build complete desktop web applications with the Firefox / Gecko web engine (something that is now popular with th…
I don’t think this is a reinvention of XHTML. It’s definitely closer in spirit to XUL, but seems different enough still that I wouldn’t call it reinvention. What seems particularly novel about this is that it’s taken the compositional approach of modern UI component libraries, and distilled it down to units of composition that can express a lot of behavior and logic declaratively . At least at a glance, that’s an imp…
Speaking of expressing a UI declaratively, and composition with web components... as a former Qt/QML dev, I always felt like Web innovations of the last decade are just rehashes of the inspirations and ideas behind what Qt's QML started offering already since 2010.
Things like CSS Grid, which was a great and celebrated new toy in 2017, but as foreigner from the Web world, I still remember how I read those news and didn't know if they were kidding.
To the standards body that may concern: just copy QML and standardize it already! :-)
Re: XMLUI
#103XML UI is all over the place. I'm working with some legacy code using JSF with some extensions and it's pretty much everything described here. There's a Java server involved so it doesn't work with saved pages (but it automatically takes care of any backend calls, so unless you want an offline-first app that can be a benefit actually). I'm pretty sure ASP.NET, or whatever Microsoft calls it these days, works very similarly.
The frontend pendulum keeps swinging back and forth between serverside rendering and clientside rendering so maybe in a few years we can reinvent ASP/JSF and call it revolutionary again.
Re: XMLUI
#104Using VB as a reference seems incorrect. Much of the appeal of Visual Basic, and Delphi, was the UI builder. Just click a button to create new project and you already had a window ready to go. Drag and drop in components, click buttons and what-not to wire up functionality. The barrier to entire was so incredibly low, having to edit XML files feels miles away from that ease of use. That being said Visual Basic also c…
Before Compose took over as the new direction for Android app development, the Android Studio designer IDE had a very VB6-style designer where you could drag and drop components, while the underlying UI files were all XML based. The callback generation wasn't as easy as with VB, and different phone sizes meant you had to deal with resizing (which VB applications usually just didn't bother with), but the experience was pretty good.
These days you've got Gambas for a free and open source VB, including the terrible language, but in my experience the looks are a bit off when you design on one desktop environment and run the application on another.
Re: XMLUI
#105Web standards are so powerful today with all the browser native form components etc, so I think one should just exploit that one and use XSLT (https://caniuse.com/?search=xslt) if you want to create an own "UI markup language". It'll render straight to everything that your browser supports, which is a lot. Then just use CSS to style it however you wish if you want to. What's nice about this approach is also that you can create a true domain-specific markup language, which will always be more clean and compact than a generic one.
Re: XMLUI
#106I am simultaneously in the seemingly opposite camps of "haha we reinvent HTML lol" and "Actually this sounds immediately useful to me".
To be human is to be multitudes.
Re: XMLUI
#107If this doesn’t use a compiler, the ”when” feature looks like it will require 'unsafe-eval' and potentially 'unsafe-inline' to be enabled in content security policy, which will disable browser XSS protections. Not optimal for an easy-to-use component system intended for display of remote data.
Edit: I don’t see a CSP on the dogfooded homepage so I would assume this is an issue.
Re: XMLUI
#108Re: XMLUI
#109XUL! why not just use htmx and the platform?
Because using htmx is asking to get defaced via XSS, or worse. Security is an afterthought for the project, which is evident from the placement of the related documentation.
Re: XMLUI
#110My recollection of XUL was that it was great when it worked, but horrific to debug.
It wasn’t also easy to make a living fixing bad VB apps (or going back to Delphi).
I’m not saying that components are a bad idea, but the 90s implementations didn’t quite realize the dream.