Kingsley Idehen's Blog Data Space

By Nigel McFarlane, devX.com

Microsoft'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.

http://www.devx.com/webdev/Article/20834