Surely this has to be a joke. If I wanted to write web stuff in XML, I would just write HTML.
XMLUI
151–160 of 345 posts
Re: XMLUI
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 di…
XULRunner's initial release was in 2006. OpenLaszlo was released in 2001. Garnet was released in the early 90's. Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad (aka Robot Draftsman) was created in 1963, and inspired the Visual Geometry Project in the mid 1980's and The Geometer's Sketchpad in 1995 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44627569 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XULRunner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenLaszlo https://en.wi…
Laszlo... I remember this one, dipped my toes in it, like many, many other GUI tools. I've been using the same backend framework for 20 years with no need to change but I can't decide which frontend GUI library I should invest my time for the future. It all looks like constant rehashing of the same ideas but with limited lifespan.
Re: XMLUI
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 wa…
Lazarus is pretty much an exact implementation of Visual Basic, just mapped to FreePascal instead of VB
Lazarus is a very faithful clone of Delphi, which is the Pascal-based main competitor of VB of the time.
Re: XMLUI
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reminds me of XAML and WPF.
I agree and that was a huge failure. One of the big reasons VB died, people will tell you, was the language. And that's true. But what they don't mention is that the other reason was the components. I'm not sure this is replicating a success story but rather failing to learn from what was not a success story.
I ran a very successful company (successful for a time) that sold Visual Basic developer tools via a printed mail-order catalog named VBxtras.
Two things killed Visual Basic:
1. The web. Visual Basic was first and foremost a Windows desktop app development tool, and their UI-first model of app development did not translate well to the web, or at least the attempts to translate to the web did not resonate.
2. Microsoft. Rather than continue the simplicity Visual Basic offered, Microsoft "improved" it by releasing VB.NET which abandoned the core simplicity that made Visual Basic so wildly popular among "Occupational Programmers," as Kathleen Dollard[1] and I lamented back in the day. The upshot was that former Visual Basic programmers fell into two (2) camps; they either:
A.) Abandoned VB for something else, or nothing at all, because they did not want to have to become a professional programmer, OR
B.) Switched to C# because if they were going to learn how to be a "real" programmer they might as learn C# and not C#'s disfavored sibling VB.NET.
I blogged about occupational programmers several times back then: https://mikeschinkel.com/tags/occupationalprogrammers/
BTW, the company that has developed XMLUI was one of our better vendors of VBX components for Visual Basic. They have since renamed to /n software, but at first they were named IP*Works (I think I stylized that name correctly per how they did at the time.)
[1] Ironically Kathleen is now leads the .NET Core CLI at Microsoft, and is also lead over VB, I think: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/author/kathleen-a-doll...)
Re: XMLUI
#155I wrote Qt C++ for 7 years as an open source contributor to KDE. This reminds me of QtWidgets’ .ui files—custom XML files following a specific schema. Later, Qt introduced QML, which I personally found unintuitive, and over time I lost interest in Qt altogether. That said, I still think XML for UI definitions makes sense, and it’s understandable that some larger environments continue to use it.
I believe the Blizzard game launcher uses QT?
Blizzard to me has always had the best execution of UI in their software/games.
Curious if there are any Qt projects you’d single out as being great?
Re: XMLUI
#156Seems 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…
XHTML was not a previous version of HTML; it was a failed successor.
HTML was originally conceived as a subset of SGML, but browsers tried to be as forgiving as possible of malformed markup and HTML-in-practice drove standards folks nuts. XHTML was intended to fix this by making a pure-XML representation of HTML, which would be unambiguous and fast to parse, but its very strict error handling made it extremely difficult to adopt. It turns out people would generally rather have a slightly wrong page than one that just said "XML Parsing Error".
WHATWG broke with W3C in 2005 to standardize HTML-in-practice into HTML5, giving up on XML compatibility and strict parsing.
Re: XMLUI
#157Eventually people will separate interface from implementation, not unlike the now-disparaged OO programming paradigm. But not yet. This article discusses something well-known among insiders -- interface schemes frequently expire along with their hosting language, because they're not a recognizable, separate entity.
After AI entirely takes over programming, interfaces will become more portable and platform-agnostic than they are now.
"AI, write me a word processor."
"What language?"
"I don't care ... do you?"
Alternative reply: "COBOL, just because I know you can."
Re: XMLUI
#158Seems 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…
XHTML was not a previous version of HTML; it was a failed successor. HTML was originally conceived as a subset of SGML, but browsers tried to be as forgiving as possible of malformed markup and HTML-in-practice drove standards folks nuts. XHTML was intended to fix this by making a pure-XML representation of HTML, which would be unambiguous and fast to parse, but its very strict error handling made it extremely diffic…
It’s not failed: it’s the only language used in the ePub standard. Though this might change with ePub 3.3 which is considering adding HTML support.
Re: XMLUI
#159I 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.
Thank you putting me onto this concept. I had not heard of Walt Whitman or his work before.
"Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself."
Re: XMLUI
#160Seems 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 remember trying to write a cross-platform interface for some software in XUL, around 2003. I even bought two (physical!) books on the subject. It was totally impossible! The libraries were ever-changing and you needed the entire Mozilla CVS tree checked out to compile anything and just getting that to compile was endless complexity. I gave up and used an early port of Gtk to Windows.
Such a "could have been great" technology if it wasn't for Mozilla ...