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XMLUI

blog.jonudell.net

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161–170 of 345 posts

Re: XMLUI

#161

Post by bjoli »

cheschire wrote: post #3

No mention of XSLT? Feels like it would be highly relevant since many folks have not considered transforming or styling XML since those days, and would be interested in understanding the huge leap from that to this. And given Jon Udell has written about XSLT before[0], I'm sure this was an intentional decision. Not sure I understand it though. 0: https://www.xml.com/pub/a/2003/08/13/udell.html

When I discovered oleh kiselyov's SXML/SSAX. It is such a amazing way to work with xml that I simply stopped doing xslt all together.

SSAX is probably the best xml parser I have ever used.

Re: XMLUI

#162

Post by airstrike »

shortstuffsushi wrote: post #141
airstrike wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a disingenuous take. You could write one, but it won't be allowed to connect to anything other than itself because Excel doesn't give it the network stack or IO it needs. Unless you use VBA, of course. See https://spreadsheets-are-all-you-need.ai/index.html

Maybe just me but seeing side by side "spreadsheets are all you need" and ".ai" seem to be somewhat uh... competing claims.

It's a play on "Attention is all you need", the seminal AI paper.

The author of that website implemented GPT-2 inference on Excel

Re: XMLUI

#163

Post by ttul »

thisislife2 wrote: post #23

Seems 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 spent an unhealthy number of hours working in XUL in 2000-2001 working on the Komodo editor, which, bizarrely, used Firefox as its GUI platform. XUL was neat, but oh god so complicated. XML was the new hotness around the peak of the DotCOM era and Mozilla’s use of XML for a GUI framework fit the zeitgeist.

Re: XMLUI

#164

Post by bjoli »

max-privatevoid wrote: post #151

Surely this has to be a joke. If I wanted to write web stuff in XML, I would just write HTML.

I will be that guy: HTML is not XML. People wanted to write malformed html so xhtml never went anywhere.

Re: XMLUI

#166

Post by b_e_n_t_o_n »

fxtentacle wrote: post #48

In my opinion, the best GUI approach is still JUCE. Every UI element is a C++ class with a drawing function. You create new UI elements by composing other elements to create another C++ class, for which the editor will auto-generate the source code. For buttons, you have a large if...else... area in the drawing function to handle different states like hover, pressed, active, disabled, etc. Behind the scenes, a thin d…

I've never used JUCE before but I agree that the imperative approach, while often larger in implementation, is usually very explicit about what is happening and allows full control. Declarative approaches always need escape hatches, and those escape hatches are usually tricky to open and pass through.

Re: XMLUI

#167

Post by cluckindan »

Someone wrote: post #127
cluckindan wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let’s see an HTTP server in an Excel sheet.

I didn’t check their claim, but https://github.com/michaelneu/webxcel : “Webxcel creates a full-fledged RESTful web backend from your Microsoft Excel workbooks. It is written in 100% plain Visual Basic macros and comes with a lot of handy tools to help you build the next big thing.”

Ha! Sure beats the pure bash HTTP server. ;-)

Re: XMLUI

#168

Post by toyg »

elviejo wrote: post #36

I applaud the idea of bringing back the Visual Basic model to the web. Again I don't expect people under 45 to remember how easy it was to develop a user interface that reacted to user actions. I just don't see the need to create a new language to do it. Firefox had XUL. And macromedia had Flex. Flex was amazing it had an XML version and an OOP one.. that where two views of exactly the same language.

Let's be honest, XUL was a pain for a number of mozilla-specific choices (rdf...). A lighter, better XUL would be absolutely fine.

Re: XMLUI

#170

Post by cyberax »

DonHopkins wrote: post #120
j1elo wrote: post #102

Earlier 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…

There was also HTMLayout released around 2003.
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