"I should clarify and say code can be declarative with the correct language support. I agree that it's probably not well suited to C# in its current state." Ok

"I should clarify and say code can be declarative with the correct language support. I agree that it's probably not well suited to C# in its current state." Ok, but which language do you think would work? Lisp? I like the things you can do with macros and s-expressions as much as the next guy, but you're still left with the question of what should people using C# (which has neither of those things) use to make GUIs. "1. Triggers, DataTriggers, EventTriggers, MultiTriggers, etc. Here we're dealing with the fact that XML is not a programming language and lacks basic control structures, so we've gone ahead and defined our own mini-programming language just so conditional values can be expressed in XML. Why?" Correct, all the different sorts of trigger are verbose. But, to answer your question as to 'why?' the reason is because we need a deterministic way to express conditional formatting. If we attempted to accomplish the same tasks with hooks we'd have the problem of intermixing imperative, state-full, code with logic that is supposed to be more deterministic. I've written code like that for WinForms like that and it's ugly and hard to debug. If you were to try to implement triggers with code behind C#, it would still be very verbose because you wouldn't be writing actual C# logic. You'd be doing something like declaring an object with trigger conditions and results and it would be at least as verbose as the XAML triggers, that is, if you wanted to accomplish the same thing with the same guarantees as with XAML triggers. The problem here isn't really the XML, but the fact that there isn't really an available language that solves the relevant problem. It's not like you could use an `if` statement. "Ever make a typo in a binding?" I have. I've also made typos when writing viewmodel objects that implement the `INotifyPropertyChanged` interface to similar effect.