Hi,

  Chris Anderson - a Microsoft Avalon developer - has
written up a blog story titled "A brief history of
XAML".

   Chris writes:

  An early debate on the Avalon team was about what
our markup should look like. We knew that we wanted a
declarative UI model - it is actually something we
have had for a long time. The Avalon team was formed
with members from all over the company - User, IE,
etc. And each team had a different history with
markup. Obviously the IE folks had used HTML and VML
in the past, while the User folks had used RC files.
To add to the great debate there was also the new
success of ASP.NET and their form of markup.

  After great debate, we decided that the programatic
object model would be based on .NET conventions. We
also felt that the markup should have the same
programming model as code. Neither HTML nor RC files
had this "markup == object model" tenet, and it made
programming difficult. ASP.NET had (basically) this
model, and people seemed to really like that.

  Finally we decided that the markup should be a new
format that was, in fact, a persistence format for
.NET objects. Thus, code like this:

Button b = new Button();
b.Text = "Hello";
b.Background = Colors.Red;

Would be transformed into:

<Button Text="Hello" Background="Red" /> 

  Of course, that wasn't the end of the debates. Now
of course, we had to decide on the object model for
our objects. Should we try to make the object model
familiar to Win32, HTML, WinForms, ASP.NET, or some
other group of developers? There were various camps,
but after the success of .NET in 2001/2 it became
increasingly obvious that a WinForms/ASP.NET based
object model would be the right thing for majority of
developers.

And so and so forth. Evidently working together with
others to build a rich internet for everyone wasn't on
the agenda.

Full story @
http://www.simplegeek.com/permalink.aspx/100aec62-3352-4c35-b471-f3f2fa5fac5a

  - Gerald

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