Microsoftie Responds To MyXAML Lead's MSXAML Critique

Hello,

   John Gossman (Microsoft) writes in the blog story titled "XAML comments by Mr. Clifton":

  His comments are right on, a sensible end note to the more confrontationl tone of the 
thread he refers to.  We struggled for a long time over somewhat conflicting visions of 
XAML:  as a declarative UI programming language, as a more general serialization 
mechanism, or as a document format.  Simiilarly we agonized over whether to be 
optimized for hand or machine processing.  It still isn't completely over:  I was talking to 
customers recently and a debate broke out over whether XAML should even be human 
readable, in particular over whether a designer should ever show it.  A show of hands 
found half of the room felt it was mandatory that XAML be displayed by the designer, and 
half were vehemently against ever looking at the stuff. 

At the end of the day, XAML is just a tool.  You can program Avalon just fine from the 
language of your choice (Python anyone?) and never see XAML.  You can write your own 
declarative mechanism, and if you want to use CSS, go ahead.  The language wars having 
been going on at least since Lisp and Fortran, and I don't have any reason to believe XAML 
will be any less controversial.  At best, it will be a fraction as successful as those two 
greybeards.

The current version of XAML (which Marc hasn't seen yet...its coming with the next CTP), 
leans much more towards being a general serialization mechanism suitable for machine 
processing.   As he suggests, we could have gone another direction and been much more 
independent of the underlying object model and much more optimized for UI design by 
humans.  That would be a different language though...and frankly, it's still waiting to be 
implemented.

   Source: http://blogs.msdn.com/johngossman/archive/2005/04/30/413754.aspx