Jon UdellXMLUI's Markdown component supports codefences that can define complete apps: a Main, one or more user-defined components, and an API. You can express quite a lot of interesting behavior in a few dozen lines of code written between triple backtics. I've been really excited about this capability but I had to write this post to fully articulate why: it's all about reproducibility.
Ken@judell I remember soaking up your articles in Infoworld on XML and playing with XLST in the early aughts. This reminds me a little bit of the Mozilla experiments with XUL, which I thought was cool, but abandoned, I think.
After XHTML kind of had an ignominious end¹, seeing a thing in the world today that’s built on XML kind of surprises me. With all the JSON and Markdown flying around, I assumed that the days of XML were behind us. Not so, apparently?
¹ Am I remembering that right? I remember reading a lot of Mark Pilgrim’s writing on the topic at the time and his quoting Postel’s Law, "Be conservative in what you send, and liberal in what you accept,” and claiming strict XHTML adherence was a violation of this principle… 🤔
@knwlkr You're absolutely right that XUL is a predecessor, among others. That said, and its name notwithstanding, I don't think XML is XMLUI's high order bit. It could have been JSON. The essence is a concise representation of app behavior that can be read and understood and written by humans (who are not deep React and CSS experts) as well as AIs.
@judell Huh, I just read more deeply into the site (and realized you’re contributing directly!). This is really interesting. And I love the reference to Visual Basic in the introductory blog post. 🥺
I do miss XUL and think about it occasionally, wondering what would have happened in an alternative universe. I’ve been doing VB-like things in note-taking app called Obsidian and creating little VBA-like applets in JavaScript, CSS and HTML that syncs between mobile and desktop. It’s nice.
I’ll play around with XMLUI. I love the vision and agree with the intent. I’m not the first to say that HTML was created for documents, not for user interfaces, and we’ve been just bolting UI concepts onto that framework ever since. This is a much better way.