From: Curt Hibbs <curt@...>
Date: 2002-01-23T03:27:55+09:00
Subject: RE: RANT: Ruby GUI API

> From: Sean Russell [mailto:ser@germane-software.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, January 22, 2002 8:32 AM
>
> I like the *idea* of XUL, but I don't like the
> implementation/definition.
> XUL does an extremely poor job of separating the MVC components.  I'm not
> sure that it is possible to separate behavior out of an XUL-like language
> (XML dialect, really, but I'll call it a language), because much
> of what a
> GUI is *is* behavior.
>
> Still, I ultimately decided that if I'm going to have to write code, I
> don't want to be doing it in XML.  XML is really good for data and
> metadata, but I don't believe that it is a good choice as a programming
> language, and that's what any non-trivial XUL requires.


I just want to emphasize for the group that Sean is entirely correct in
this.

My paying work (i.e. my non-Ruby work) is a very large and complicated
client-server application written in XUL & JavaScript on the client size.
"extremely poor job of separating MVC components" is right on the mark. I
see this first hand.

But I think the fault is not in the concept, but in Mozilla's
implementation. Its trying to be a souped up HTML and as such heavily mixes
UI definition and UI behavior in the XUL tags, themselves. A better approach
would be to let the XUL simply define the UI components and their layout,
and completely separating out behavior.

Curt