XAML (at least the tighter-scoped Silverlight incarnation of it) was an absolute joy to use - if you used it correctly. It was an absolute monster if you used it in the most obvious (and incorrect) way. That's probably the reason other than HTML5 that it fell off: good tools steer novices into the pit of success, and XAML really didn't do that at all.
XMLUI
81–90 of 345 posts
Re: XMLUI
#82> The project we’re announcing today, XMLUI, brings the VB model to the modern web But this ugly XML was the worst part of the old UI building experience, and you've made it worse by turning into a poor man's programming language without all the tooling proper languages have to support the poor user. The good part was the immediate visual feedback in a GUI editor where you couldn't break anything by forgetting to clo…
how do u like jsx then?
JSX has all the tooling available.
Re: XMLUI
#83So you built a worse alternative to React, on top of React?
Re: XMLUI
#84No 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
My first exposure to XSLT was sketchers.com: https://thedailywtf.com/articles/Sketchy-Skecherscom
Sadly it doesn't seem like they're using it anymore.
Re: XMLUI
#85No 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
Every time I've seen XSLT deployed, it was "that one hairball that no one besides the original author dares to touch". I'm not sure what it is about the technology, but it seems to either inevitably desolve into a complex mess or attract complexity fetishists. Either way, not something that would be an obvious choice for what OP is going for.
its because it demands to everything to be effectively processed in a one liner and is locked into its early version due to a licensing failure (I've yet to work in an org that pays up). So if you work in XSLT, then you're stuck in 1999.
IMHO the pattern to improve XSLT is to call out into more useful languages like javascript, which ofc somewhat defeats the point of using it, but it is a useful pattern to slowly move away from it, when encountering it in legacy projects.
Re: XMLUI
#86This looks (at a glance) similar in many ways to Adobe's defunct MXML [1] which was the backbone of the Flex platform built on Flash.
Apparently this lives on in Apache Royale [2]
Using XML for an user interface description language is quite common, from XUL to XAML to JSX. In my experience, XML is well suited to this task.
Re: XMLUI
#87Recently used a lot of HaxeUI for a game and it felt similar to this. A lot of components included out of the box that “just work” with some basic styling. And you can use CSS styling on top to further customize as needed. Works across a lot of different platforms as well.
I read that as Haskell and I definitely think HaskellUI would solve all problems. /j
Re: XMLUI
#88Seems 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 impressive feat. Not necessarily in terms its technical capabilities (though that seems impressive too), but in terms of how it simplifies modeling interactive and data-driven UI.
Re: XMLUI
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've also seen examples that are pushed way further than I thought possible. I'm thinking about some of the things people do in Excel.
In 2010 I was working for a student computer support shop. We had web developers building our own ticketing system. In those days, I was told that everything in the UI was just tables. It was the only way they could get enough control on UI elements before div tags became widely spread.
I still love using tables in 2025 for webapps designed to run on old browsers. It's easy to render data into them (it's just headers, rows, columns) and they automatically have a cool, functional look (IMO).