John,
On 22 Feb 2005, at 15:42, John Allsopp wrote:
I don't think it's beyond the scope of the W3C. We're constantly looking
at technologies like XUL. Do people see the need for standardisation
in this area?
Sure.
I think the real benefit of standardisation and standards bodies is not necessarily the standards they develop (in a sense, it's not even necessary, and arguably not even advisable they develop those standards, at least not from top to bottom) but that by anointing technology it becomes a common good.
Agreed. It seems to be a fairly common discussion topic nowadays as to whether or not a standards body should be generally creating or generally adopting. My take is "it depends".
The alternative is "industry standards" that is winner takes all proprietary technologies, which are the property and strategic asset of their creator.
XUL/XAML is a very good example of this. XUL was developed at Mozilla, whose implementation was a great proof of concept. It's a shame that early on in its development Mozilla didn't take it to WC
By this you mean flush it down the toilet? ;)
and say, look here is this really cool technology that works, would you guys like to work with us to standardize this?
Or maybe they did and I don't know about it.
As far as I know, XUL was never a submission to W3C. I know a lot of W3C Groups have considered work in the general area (including XForms and SVG, and obviously CSS has been thinking about UI). In the cases I'm aware of we were hesitant to start down the road of defining a UI toolkit (we'd heard many horror stories of how much effort it is to complete such a task).
However, maybe we were wrong? Maybe XUL is a comfortable sweet spot?
Unfortunately now we have two competing technologies that are similar, leading to years if not decades in the delay of the adoption of XUL like solutions.
Interesting that you think the appearance of XAML will have an effect on XUL adoption, since XUL has been around for so long. I'm not saying that I think it won't delay adoption, just that I don't know :)
I'm hoping that the fact that proprietary Web Application technologies such as XAML and Flash are getting more attention means that we are approaching the point where we could think about standardisation in this area. I also think it's so broad a field that we shouldn't think that one size will fit all. That's like saying you should only ever use C++. However, XUL may be a great start.
Just as an aside why
<circle> and not <solid class="whatever">
.whatever {shape: circle}
This is a good question. The reason is that you still have to define all the properties of the circle (eg. radius). This could certainly be done via CSS:
.whatever {display: circle; radius: 10cm} // note I used "display" because
// I think it's a better match
This seems ok for circle (CSS x,y could be used to position). However, what about a general polygon, or an arbitrary shape?
.whatever {display: polygon; points: 10,20 23,23 ..... }You'd end up inventing a bunch of properties for the many structural attributes. As these can be quite complicated, it means your CSS parser would require a whole set of additional micro-parsers.
In the end I think you'd come to the conclusion that CSS is a pretty good technology for styling HTML, an acceptable technology for laying- out HTML, and probably not the right technology for displaying arbitrary content as graphics or very complex text.
Furthermore, just as a <h1> in HTML is always a heading, a <circle> in SVG is always a circle. Having just a <solid> element and using CSS is similar to having only <div> in HTML (with display: heading1).
Are we off topic?
Dean
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