A W3C Standard for XML-based User Interfaces?

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John Carroll over on ZDNet has a post about some of the European Commission’s statements about XAML and WPF trying to take over HTML. That’s a discussion for another day but I think the EC is making itself look bad. XAML and WPF aren’t going to replace HTML.

But in an article he linked to there was an interesting quote from Daniel Glazman who is part of the CSS Working Group:

“With dozens of Mozilla milestones in the wild, and almost in sync with [Internet Explorer 7], the W3C finally discovers the whole browser world uses XML-based UI languages,” Glazman wrote. Citing a W3C document, he continued, “The future W3C format will ‘be based on an existing application/UI format, such as Mozilla’s XUL, Microsoft’s XAML, Macromedia’s MXML or Laszlo Systems’ LZX, provided the owners of the format are willing to contribute.”

I hadn’t really thought of a “standardized” W3C XML-based UI language before, though I suppose it’s possible. There is a Web Application Formats Working Group which looks like its goal is to standardize these things:

This deliverable should be based on an existing application/UI format, such as Mozilla’s XUL, Microsoft’s XAML, Macromedia’s MXML or Laszlo Systems’ LZX, provided the owners of the format are willing to contribute. The format should allow embedded program code. This format, combined with the deliverables below and existing technologies including XHTML, CSS, XForms, SVG and SMIL, should provide a strong basis for rich client application development.

This is actually making me think a lot more about XAML and HTML. I mean are we in some ways replacing HTML with Rich Internet Applications? Obviously HTML won’t go away, but it’s also too limited for what the web has become.

[tags]W3C, Rich Internet Applications, UI[/tags]

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  • http://www.formsPlayer.com/ Mark Birbeck

    Ryan,

    As it happens, the ‘W3C stack’ of XHTML, XForms and SVG is already as powerful as languages like XAML, particularly if you throw XBL into the mix. Of course the problem, as always, is that it’s a standard, which means that people can’t quite work out how to make money from it. :) So languages like XAML and MXML will obviously continue to be promoted.

    I’ve spent a lot of time showing how XHTML+XForms+SVG+XBL+MathML can be used to create desktop applications, and my company has created a new kind of application framework–called Sidewinder–that makes use of these standards all the way through.

    A simple but powerful illustration of the framework (hopefully interesting to you given you’ve written on Flex and Apollo) is Sidewinder running Adobe’s Flexstore demo as a desktop application. As it happens in this case, there is no programming needed, since this ‘desktop application’ can be created via the command-line.

    We’ve called this combination of W3C languages ‘xH’, for want of a name. I spoke about it at Euro Foo last year, as well as writing that it is part of the story to make Ajax easier to program, in Is it AJAX, Ajax…or XForms. (There’s also more info on our site: xH: The New Programming Language You Already Know.)

    Regards,

    Mark

    Mark Birbeck
    w: http://www.formsPlayer.com/
    b: http://internet-apps.blogspot.com/

  • http://blog.digitalbackcountry.com Ryan Stewart

    Hey Mark, thanks for leaving the comment. This looks pretty neat so I’m going to check it out more this week. I’ll try and drop you a line so we can talk more about it.