XBL Submission to the W3CFriday February 23rd, 2001Ian Hickson writes: I love XBL. I am going to create my own widget set for Jabberzilla using it. http://mozdev.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=167 if you are interested in what I am planning. Some of this stuff I already have working. XBL allows another level of componentization that really makes things easy in implementing Mozilla applications. http://xiowa.com/jabberzilla/screenshot.png is a screenshot of <roster/> working. Both the rosters update simultaneously via the Jabber component. Way cool. Actually (and unfortunately) the w3 page says that the submission is from AOL iirc. :( Quote from the page: "W3C is pleased to receive the XBL submission ("XML Binding Language 1.0") from America Online, Inc." Man that sucks! "The submission was developed through mozilla.org. The document is being submitted to the W3C by America Online, Inc on behalf of itself and mozilla.org." Mozilla.org is not a member of the w3c, so they asked for AOL to submit it on it's behalf. Please don't post flamebait. Well, Mozilla is funded by AOL. Without AOL no Mozilla :-( Mozilla is funded by anyone willing to pay someone to work on the project or to donate equipment or to work on the project themselves. AOL is one such player in this game but definitely not the only one. There are many engineers paid to work on Mozilla that are employed by companies other than AOL. There are many folks making mozilla better on their own time. There are many groups contributing equipment and other resources to Mozilla. "Without AOL no Mozilla" is total bullshit. Without AOL slower progress on making Mozilla better, yes, I'd accept that but if you're not the troll you appear to be and you actually believe what you're saying, that without AOL Mozilla ceases to exist, then you're completely out of touch with this project your comments should be ignored. If the more likely case is true, that you're just a troll, then take your bs to slashdot or some other forum. --Asa Maybe I did express myself badly. Netscape/AOL released the source. Netscape/AOL are paying most of the engineers working on Mozilla but I think that even if AOL pulled all its fundings for Mozilla it is here to stay. If AOL pulled its funding of Mozilla that would probably be the hardest blow imaginary. At the bottom of the page http://www.w3.org/Submission/2001/05/Comment there is a link to Spice. Has anyone at Mozilla taken a look at it? Wow... Spice seems a lot more powerful and easier to use than XBL. It just sucks that we will have behaviors, xbl and a w3c format. Spice is a lot cleaner than XBL, which (as the W3C noted) spreads code out between HTML, CSS, XML, and JavaScript -- a big mess. But as the W3C also noted, Spice does not seem to do anything for reducing the amount of procedural code involved in writing user interfaces, and so does not satisfy the "principle of least power." This pragmatically means that neither XBL nor Spice move toward the goal of allowing user interfaces to be created by non-programmers. It seems all the proposals on the table are inadequate. Lee PS. Did anyone look at the XBL example at http://www.shadowland.org/xbl/test5/test.html ? It looks like crap on my Windows 2K system with Netscape 6. Is this even a proof of concept? The interaction capabilities are nice but if you can't deliver a professional appearance, forget it! "The interaction capabilities are nice but if you can't deliver a professional appearance, forget it!" Ahh, did you read that page's title? ("Test #5") Did you note which menu the link to it is under in Mozilla? ("Debug") It's a test, for debugging. It isn't a 100% polished, all singing, all dancing, killer post-it-note application. It was used to test and debug XBL. It's useful as an example. It isn't useful as an application. How many teach-yourself books give you 100% complete applications with a professional appearance? Not many. Given that it was constructed using XHTML, ECMAScript and CSS, it *would* be possible to make it look and work as professionally as any web site out there, but why bother for a demo meant for testing and debugging? Show me. Do it. I've seen lots of bad dialogs on Mac Mozilla that seemed to have to do with string size differences. This demo seems to have a very similar problem. Can XBL solve that problem or not? Lee "Show me. Do it." I really can't be bothered, I'm too busy working on a real XBL aplication.. Cool, how are you dealing with string size differences between platforms? I guess I'm not. I've never seen the problem, so I don't feel too incliened to deal with it. It does not appear to me that the comments at http://www.w3.org/Submission/2001/05/Comment are positive. Lee It would seem that they don't like the idea of a CSS/XML/Javascript combination. They are suggesting Spice http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/NOTE-spice-19980123.html , which is based on ECMAScript. I'm sure someone can create a Spice like system via XBL/DOM/Javascript. I looked for any reference to "security" on the proposal and couldn't find any. What are the security implications of XBL? Less |