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/