Insert my endless rant that most native apps are just interactive documents, that XML tree structures are a fine way to represent application state, and that na

Insert my endless rant that most native apps are just interactive documents, that XML tree structures are a fine way to represent application state, and that native platforms like Linux would probably be a lot better if all of their apps rendered to some kind of DOM-like primitive instead of pixel buffers. XML/DOM representations of graphical state are a lot closer to the Unix ideal that we have in the command line. A big reason why the command line is often more powerful than a graphical interface is because the command line allows users to easily wrap around, extend, pipe, scrape, script, and translate interfaces. HTML is the evolution of that ideal -- a statement that graphical interfaces should be as flexible and as manipulable as a command line interface. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24270960 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24270960 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21347067 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21347067 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21498349 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21498349