Re: is xul a html replacement or a gui layout dialect

hi denis,

   here is my opinion on the subject:

    relative to today's common practice of designing
    html-based web applications, i believe that
    xul web apps has the potential to really improve
    things.  i think so far it has been mostly untapped.

    xul provides the following things that
    html does not that make it a much better
    candidate for building web/markup-based applications:

     a. application-like ui layout semantics (html follows
      a document-style layout)
     b. very rich widgets

    one can hardly tell apart xul-constructed guis from
    ones that are built the more 'traditional' fashion
    (the hard way: by hand).

    where i see xul falling short is in not addressing
    web forms.  it doesn't mean that one can't do forms
    with it.  it only means that more work is necessary
    for javascript to bundle the various pieces of
    information into a form in order to make a remote
    procedure call.

    i'm no expert on luxor, but what i like about luxor
    is the realization that markup-based construction of
    a ui is much easier and possibly more maintainable
    than doing it by hand.. and that this has nothing to
    do with the web.  that it is possible to write an
    engine that will automatically translate xul markup
    into a swing application.  so with luxor one ought
    to be able to build guis more quickly than using the
    traditional route.

   i hope i've properly understood/addressed your question.

thanks, eitan

programmer
austin, texas

denis cardon wrote:
> Hi subscibers,
> 
> I wanted to get your feeling on the following point : 
> If you look at xul specs (on xulplanet for example),
> it seems that it has been designed as a html form
> replacement, with extensability added (new widgets),
> using javascript and jsp stype server-side
> programming.
> 
> In the luxor style of programming, xul is more a
> layout engine, which is the way most of the gui xml
> dialects works nowadays.
> 
> So do you think the xul jsp type programming really
> does has some potential or not? Asking this question,
> I am also thinking in the type of programming model
> (transport, client-side updates, etc.) that is needed
> in a high latency network like the web.
> 
> Hope my questions is clear enough.
> 
> Cheers,
> Denis