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First, many years ago, they should have made an XUL IDE. Then they should have focused on XML and giving the world an XML based web-browser, trying to drive XM
by zmix 9y ago
First, many years ago, they should have made an XUL IDE.
Then they should have focused on XML and giving the world an XML based web-browser, trying to drive XML further. XML would have had a much better chance on the web, if web-servers could have responded to URL encoded XPaths (or even XQueries in POST/GET), serving back XML Fragments which could have been XMLIncluded by the browser. They could have lobbied that.
Now we've got HTML5...
- nitrogen 9y agoThat sounds rather unpleasant from a user or non-XML-loving developer perspective. Such a heavy focus on XML for XML's sake would have guaranteed Firefox's decline into obscurity.
- koffiezet 9y agoXUL was a horrible idea, certainly at the time. Firefox's UI felt sluggish due to it, certainly since I was used to Opera's blazing fast and responsive UI, which I stuck to for exactly that reason. I only had Firefox installed for compatibility reasons. People seem to forget that while IE was a mess, Firefox was only "better", not "amazingly fantastically better". With computers having become faster, together with development thrown at it, that's not really an issue anymore, but developers have also realized these days that XML is far from human readable, and for the majority of applications it has been used for, simply a bad idea.