Jon has been around for a long time, and I've been a long-time fan. He's a bit of an elder: he's seen a lot of things, and he's worth listening to.
> I’m a fan of web components but it’s the React flavor that dominate and they are not accessible to the kind of developer who could productively use Visual Basic components back in the day.
I think this is the most important statement in the piece. The rest of the post explains the technical details, but this explains _why_ this exists. This is a bold statement, but I don't think he's wrong.
Now, is XMLUI the _right_ set of abstractions to help these developers? We'll have to wait an see. But I love to see the attempt!
The funny thing about this - and I don't know whether this is as good or a bad thing - is that you could probably almost implement this XMLUI entirely in React/JSX.
Glancing over the markup, none of this seems too alien to React.
This all seems not too dissimilar to the generic pages-as-JSON DSL that every CMS/developer reinvents every other project.
Windows is a narrower platform than evergreen JS-enabled browsers, and the relevance of Windows as a platform is only going to go down. So the choice of the platform is right.
What are some GUI-enabled devices you wish you were able to address, but which cannot run Firefox, Safari, or a Chromium derivative?
> I’m a fan of web components but it’s the React flavor that dominate and they are not accessible to the kind of developer who could productively use Visual Basic components back in the day.
I think this is the most important statement in the piece. The rest of the post explains the technical details, but this explains _why_ this exists. This is a bold statement, but I don't think he's wrong.
Now, is XMLUI the _right_ set of abstractions to help these developers? We'll have to wait an see. But I love to see the attempt!