Brandon Fuller

PDC 2003: Still Two Metaphors

Here at the PDC, Microsoft keeps talking about how its stupid to have the “web world” and the “Windows application world”. Both are completely separate and you have different tools, navigations, etc. in each. They claim they want to merge the two worlds.

Today, I realized that with the introduction of XAML that they have redeveloped yet another divide. All web apps are written using HTML/XHTML/DHTML. Now, this is a language that describes UI. It does “widgets” as well, such as text entry boxes, combo boxes, etc.

Now, with XAML, we just got a new syntax to do that same type of stuff. There is a new XML tag for an input box, a combo box, etc. and they have nothing to do with HTML-type syntaxes. My favorite was that HTML has the <br> for the line break and now XAML has …of course…something different — the <LineBreak/> tag.

So we now have to learn one XML syntax for Windows apps and another for web apps. That seems to be a continued divide in this goal of bringing the two worlds together. It would have been cool.

Now, I suppose you could argue that XAML is going to be much richer than HTML. I suppose that could be true. But it might have been nice to use HTML as a foundation in someway so we don’t have yet another XML schema to learn.