Did the tables showing tag equivalents in XAML, XUL, SVG, and XHTML help you get a handle on XAML's features? Do you think the name changes for such common functionality as <Bold> for <b> are useful and intuitive? Do you think the lack of CSS support is important? Finally, if you haven't already made up your mind about whether you'll use XAML, when it's available, did this article sway your opionion one way or the other? Let us know in the Web Development forum.
Microsoft's Longhorn will introduce XAML, an application development framework for Web and Windows apps. But just how different is XAML from the already-available public standards set by the W3C?
by Nigel McFarlane
April 20, 2004
icrosoft's XAML markup language floats on top of the .NET platform. It is compiled into .NET classes, usually C#, which reduces it to a set of objects. Along with a host of other XML dialects it is an example of a new type of specification for GUIs. This article takes a look at XAML's tags to see what—if anything—is new in them.
There are many such GUI specifications now, a few being Mozilla's XUL, Oracle's UIX, Macromedia's Flex and the XML files created by the Gnome Glade tool. Although not W3C standards, some of these new GUI specifications are already on the W3C standards track. An example is the box model used within Mozilla's XUL, which is headed toward inclusion in future CSS drafts.
The original and most popular source of XML definitions is, however, still the World Wide Web Consortium. The W3C is responsible for formalizing XML and many XML applications such as XHTML and SVG. Given that these standards are mostly complete, do we really need all these new XML GUI dialects? Microsoft's XAML is a new spin on XML-based GUI description languages, borrowing very little syntax from established standards. Let's see if it's a radical improvement in some way, or if it's merely familiar old friends dressed up in new clothes.
XAML vs. CSS2
For this article, I grabbed a handful of W3C standards and a list of XAML tags. I matched the tags up according to functionality where possible, and then sorted them by W3C standards. Here are the results. The first thing that struck me is the way XAML expresses quite a bit of style information using whole tags. Table 1 shows the bits of XAML that closely match aspects of the CSS2 specification:
Table 1. XAML tags that duplicate CSS2 functionality.
XAML Tag
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icrosoft's XAML markup language floats on top of the .NET platform. It is compiled into .NET classes, usually C#, which reduces it to a set of objects. Along with a host of other XML dialects it is an example of a new type of specification for GUIs. This article takes a look at XAML's tags to see what—if anything—is new in them.
