XUL and Standards - Open XUL Alliance Upcoming

Hi,

  A questions I hear often lately is:

   Is XUL a standard?

  and I thought I post my answer from a recent online
discussion here:

<quote>
XUL follows the HTML route/model, that is, first you
built it and than the industry leaders get together
and hammer out a standard that actually works and more
important is backed by working high-quality, widely
used open-source XUL engines/browsers.

Compare this "grass-root" model with the doomed
"top-down" model followed by W3C XForms or XHTML 2.0,
for example, where the spec leads naively believe that
Microsoft will play along and beef up their browser
while endangering their Windows money machine. Don't
expect any W3C "standards" showing up in Internet
Exploder anytime soon.

Think of Mozilla XUL as an early draft that needs a
shake out in the market (a.k.a real-world) like HTML
0.5 years ago. Having no standard in the beginning is
great because it allows everybody to innovate without
getting dragged down by a committee.
</quote>

 I also might add that I plan to kick off the Open XUL
Alliance - a new organization charted with fostering
XUL standards, interop and best practices - over the
next couple of weeks.

  Let me know what you think.

  - Gerald


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