The devshed newsletter came today and I got reading about XUL (XML User Interface Language) pronounced zool. XUL is subset of XML specifically designed to describe user interfaces.
After reading the article I went searching for a better understanding, starting at wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XUL – Wikipedia entry
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/xul/ – Mozilla overview of XUL
http://xulplanet.com/tutorials/whyxul.html – Really good tutorials and explanations
The bit that really interests me is the planned support to create standalone applications. Currently I use hta (html application) files to run flash and html content on the users machine that needs to save out. This works really well but requires ie5+ on the users machine. I know this is not a big requirement but it is always nice to have an alternative especially controlled with the flexibility of xml.
This technology is also used to create extensions and skins for firefox. Although I don’t have any useful ideas I will muck around with this too.
In my travels I also discovered UIML (User Interface Markup Language) and wikipedias hello world page.
