XUL will fail because it's too hard to get into

Posted May 7, 2004 9:29 UTC (Fri) by rwmj (subscriber, #5474)
In reply to: Where is the XAML threat? by tjc
Parent article: The first Mono beta release

I've posted before on the subject of XUL's shortcomings:

http://lwn.net/Articles/80684/

Since that posting, I've bought and read the RAD for Mozilla book, upgraded to Mozilla 1.7RC1, and gone back to the application I was designing. I actually stand by most of the things I said originally. I have found that XUL is:

Still mostly undocumented, beyond the very simple stuff.
Unstable - I can crash Mozilla easily with simple XUL programs.
Hard to set up right: it took me a full 3 days to install a XUL demo program under a 'chrome:' URL, because the 'installed-chrome.txt' and 'chrome.rdf' files are incredibly sensitive to minor changes, and there is absolutely no feedback when things go wrong. The chrome: URL still sometimes 'just breaks' on its own, and I end up endlessly restarting Mozilla and deleting 'chrome.rdf' files until it works again.
Non-trivial XUL programs depend on the internals of Mozilla - try using the <editor> tag for instance.

I like to think I'm a pretty experienced programmer - I've been doing programming in many different languages for 20 years or more - and if I can't write a simple XUL-based editor after two weeks, then there is something deeply wrong with the environment.

Rich.