Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pretty sure Jon Udell remembers XUL.
I do indeed.
/me feigns shock
XMLUI
341–345 of 345 posts
Re: XMLUI
#342Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s a mixture of XUL and HTML nowadays. The reason is, most of the things that were only available in XUL are now possible in HTML, and it’s eaaier to find developers who know HTML.
> and it’s eaaier to find developers who know HTML Rather: find developers who have a shallow knowledge of HTML. I do claim that it takes much less time as a developer to get to a decent level of XUL knowledge than to get to a decent devel of HTML knowledge.
I agree, but also it’s the fact that there’s a steady supply of devs who already know decent HTML, while not many who know XUL. It would be easy to apply your HTML knowledge to XUL, but since we already support interleaving HTML and XUL, why not let people just use what they’re used to?
That said, I didn’t really look into it all that much! I just happen to know about it because I was doing some userChrome.css stuff back in the day.
Just came across this Firefox.html announcement in another thread and it might have some more context: https://web.archive.org/web/20230402033035/https://mail.mozi...
Re: XMLUI
#343I 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.
I think Flex was that better XUL
Re: XMLUI
#344Almost immediately is the reason I don't like using this stuff. A hardcoded default value. There are so many things these UI generators can almost do but don't, and a default value for a dynamic selection is often one of the trickier ones to get right.
Here's the How To for that: https://docs.xmlui.org/howto#set-the-initial-value-of-a-sele... Our hope is that by building up a set of these patterns, and making them available to agents via MCP, it will be as easy as possible to get things right.
No offense, but you failed here. What if nothing gets returned? Now you're basically just writing code. Debatably even that example you're just writing code. An onLoad callback with array indexing and child access? This is just JavaScript wrapped in XML.
Re: XMLUI
#345Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my hands they do
In other hands, I have seen Excel spreadsheet hundred-products pricelists become a freaking tangle of merged cells, multiple rows for products, spelling mistakes, multiple spaces everywhere, and price cells hand-formatted. And I had to export the contents to machine readable .csv...
That sounds like a nightmare to untangle. On the other hand, it would be very satisfying to go from the original pricelists to a new, cleaned format!