Re: The Lessons of AJAX: Will History Repeat Itself When it Comes to Adoption of XAML/Avalon?

Hi Gerald,

The comment that I posted on Dare's blog was this:

You mention the feasibility of cloning if the technology (XAML/Avalon) 
is evolved at a regular pace.  I would think this would be a key concern 
with anyone adopting XAML as a browser technology, whether you're a 
browser developer or a web developer.  As stated in Micah Dubinko's 
writeup of the recent XTech 2005, "At its heart, though, XAML is an 
interchangeable XML representation of underlying .NET objects."

Well, we've seen how the .NET classes have changed between .NET 1.0, 
1.1, and 2.0.  What's the cost of playing catch-up whenever Microsoft 
comes out with new/changed classes and changes in the XAML markup syntax?

And XAML will never become an open standard unless it's decoupled from 
the underlying .NET classes.  A standard would mean Microsoft would be 
locked into a specific version of the .NET implementation, given that 
XAML is essentially a reflection engine.  You'd need an abstraction 
layer to allow .NET to continue moving forward while having a clearly 
defined markup standard.  Do you think that will really happen?

Marc

Gerald Bauer wrote:

> Hello,
>
>   Microsoft .NET XML Program Manager Dare Obasanjo writes in the blog 
> story titled "The Lessons of AJAX: Will History Repeat Itself When it 
> Comes to Adoption of XAML/Avalon?":
>
>   If Web browsers such as Firefox had not cloned Microsoft's 
> proprietary APIs in a way made it easy to write what were formerly IE 
> specific applications in a cross-browser manner then AJAX wouldn't be 
> the hip buzzword du jour. This brings me to Microsoft's next 
> generation of technologies for building rich internet applications; 
> Avalon and XAML.
>
> A few months ago, C|Net ran an article entitled Will AJAX help Google 
> Clean Up? 
> <http://news.com.com/Will+AJAX+help+Google+clean+up/2100-1032_3-5621010.html> 
> In the article the following statement was attributed to a Microsoft 
> representative
>
>    "It's a little depressing that developers are just now wrapping
>    their heads around these things we shipped in the late 20th
>    century," said Charles Fitzgerald, Microsoft's general manager for
>    platform technologies. "But XAML is in a whole other class. This
>    other stuff is very kludgy, very hard to debug. We've seen some
>    pretty impressive hacks, but if you look at what XAML starts to
>    solve, it's a major, major step up."
>
> Based on how adoption of DHTML/AJAX occured over the past few years I 
> suspect that Avalon/XAML will follow a similar path since the initial 
> conditions are similar. If I am correct then even if Avalon/XAML is a 
> superior technology to DHTML/AJAX (which I believe to be the case) it 
> will likely be shunned on the Web due to lack of cross-browser 
> interoperability but may flourish within homogenous intranets. This 
> shunning will continue until suitable clones for the functionality of 
> Avalon/XAML appears for other browsers. In which case as soon as some 
> highly visible pragmatist 
> <http://software.ericsink.com/Act_Your_Age.html> adopts the technology 
> then it will become acceptable. However it is unclear to me that 
> cloning XAML/Avalon is really feasible especially if the technology is 
> evolved at a regular pace as opposed to being let languish as 
> Microsoft's DHTML/AJAX technologies have been. This would mean that 
> Avalon/XAML would primarily be an intranet technology used by internal 
> businesses applications and some early adopter websites as was the 
> case with DHTML/AJAX. The $64,000 question for me is whether this is a 
> desirable state of affairs for Microsoft and if not what should be 
> done differently to prevent it?
>
>   Source: 
> http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/CommentView.aspx?guid=b9530cd2-4fd3-4321-9289-ba37538dc031 
>
>
>    Any thoughts? Any comments?
>
>    - Gerald
>
> PS: Over a year ago Dare Obasanjo wrote:
>
> sigh
>
> I'm very curious as to where this XAML is intended to replace HTML 
> meme started. All I've ever heard about XAML is that it is the new way 
> to write Windows client apps. Your question is like asking where is 
> the equivalent of doing "Dynamic HTML" in a Windows Forms application 
> like RSS Bandit, the answer to that questions is "Why would I have to 
> do that?"
>
> DHTML arose because HTML was about static content. GUI widgets for the 
> typical operating system are by definition not static.
> I'll keep saying, the biggest mistake the XAML folks made was basing 
> it on markup (XML specifically). Now everyone expects it to act like 
> their favorite markup language. Funny enough, if I ever have to edit 
> XAML by hand I'll consider it a failing of the next (next) version of 
> Visual Studio.
>
> Source: http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/1644.html
>
>
>
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