The Forgotten Macro Language of HTML: XBL 2.0

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.

Comments

Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you even read any of the documents you linked in this post? XBL was never a macro language for HTML, though it could be used for that purpose. It was created by Mozilla specifically for use with XUL. They submitted it to the W3C as a Technical Note (http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/NOTE-xbl-20010223/), and their implementation didn't match the specification they submitted, so naturally it didn't go anywhere. XBL 2.0 was done properly, and is at the Candidate Recommendation stage. However, it will likely never go beyond that: not just because it hasn't for 6 years now, but because the W3C requires two complete and interoperable implementations to exist. Since all the other browsers already have their own ways to mangle CSS into non-standardness, there's not much interest in adopting it.

It's been superceded by Web Components

[Amtiskaw]

It's been superceded by Web Components: https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/webcomponents/raw-file/tip/explainer/index.html

That's why it's dead.

Re:Visual Studio for ASP.NET

[evilviper]

With nearly 10x more users than 6 months before

Those figures are for IIS 8 specifically, not IIS in general. That just means a new version was released, and while only one guy way using it 6 months ago, there's now a few hundred active instances, so the statistics fly all to hell...

you are also hard pressed to find a graph which shows less than 40% IIS usage.

Netcraft says all Microsoft web servers, combined, total just 12% of active sites, as of Feb 2013: Google's own custom, in-house web server may soon surpass IIS in market share.

Meanwhile, Apache and nginx total 67% of the market.

http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2013/02/01/february-2013-web-server-survey.html