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The Forgotten Macro Language of HTML: XBL 2.0

Posted by Unknown on from the no-nice-things-for-you dept.

tvlinux writes "The web is becoming more than just a media display; there is more interaction and more special things that need to be done. Right now, jQuery is the preferred method of a very dynamic user interface. There is a W3 standard called XBL2.0. It is the macro language of HTML. To me it seems like a great idea — reusable HTML widgets, where each one is a separate object contained with in itself. You can define properties, methods, and events, each of which is self-contained. If the browsers supported XBL2, I can envision a whole ecosystem of new widgets, charts, grids and inputs that people could add to web pages just like any other HTML element. I see less experienced developers being able to create fancy websites by just using DOM and not having to learn jquery. My question: why is XBL dead? I think a macro-language for HTML is a good idea." XBL is alive and well, but only for XUL. Looks like another casualty of HTML5's rejection of XML.

1 of 138 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Visual Studio for ASP.NET by terjeber · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    Everything he said is true

    OK, just curious...

    more scalable

    The MS stack scales pretty well these days. IIS is not at the top of the line but neither is it IIS5 or IIS6 which were pretty bad. If you can run the iCloud on Windows Servers (they do) then you can scale on Windows.

    free (to deploy and to get the dev tools)

    The only thing that is not free for the ASP.NET stack is Windows on the box you develop. Both the stack and the dev tools are free. The express versions of Visual Studio are basically fully functional except for TFS (and a few other minor issues) but I use Git also for my Win development, so that is not an issue.

    cross-platform

    Mono is coming along quite nicely. I run two .NET MVC sites on Linux/Mono.

    (do you really want to be forced to run Windows on your server?

    For the majority of enterprise businesses, that is the only thing they do, and they should not even consider thinking about hiring someone to wonder if the should deploy Linux boxes in their business. Anyone small to medium enterprise thinking about putting stuff on Linux should do so in the Cloud, not on premise, but a lot of companies wants or needs their servers on-premise, and the majority of them should use Windows. It's what they know and the training cost alone for putting Linux in place would be a silly investment. Windows just works for most people, and that's good enough.