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I don’t think this is a reinvention of XHTML. It’s definitely closer in spirit to XUL, but seems different enough still that I wouldn’t call it reinvention. Wh

I don’t think this is a reinvention of XHTML. It’s definitely closer in spirit to XUL, but seems different enough still that I wouldn’t call it reinvention. What seems particularly novel about this is that it’s taken the compositional approach of modern UI component libraries, and distilled it down to units of composition that can express a lot of behavior and logic declaratively. At least at a glance, that’s an impressive feat. Not necessarily in terms its technical capabilities (though that seems impressive too), but in terms of how it simplifies modeling interactive and data-driven UI.

j1elo 1y ago
Speaking of expressing a UI declaratively, and composition with web components... as a former Qt/QML dev, I always felt like Web innovations of the last decade are just rehashes of the inspirations and ideas behind what Qt's QML started offering already since 2010. Things like CSS Grid, which was a great and celebrated new toy in 2017, but as foreigner from the Web world, I still remember how I read those news and didn't know if they were kidding. To the standards body that may concern: just copy QML and standardize it already! :-)
- DonHopkins 1y ago
  XULRunner's initial release was in 2006. OpenLaszlo was released in 2001. Garnet was released in the early 90's. Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad (aka Robot Draftsman) was created in 1963, and inspired the Visual Geometry Project in the mid 1980's and The Geometer's Sketchpad in 1995 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44627569 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44627569 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XULRunner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XULRunner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenLaszlo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenLaszlo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Geometer%27s_Sketchpad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Geometer%27s_Sketchpad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sketchpad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sketchpad
  - JodieBenitez 1y ago
    Laszlo... I remember this one, dipped my toes in it, like many, many other GUI tools. I've been using the same backend framework for 20 years with no need to change but I can't decide which frontend GUI library I should invest my time for the future. It all looks like constant rehashing of the same ideas but with limited lifespan.
  - cyberax 1y ago
    There was also HTMLayout released around 2003.
  - asadotzler 1y ago
    XUL applications outside of Mozilla existed well before XULRunner (itself barely a product.) Of course Mozilla was the main client at XUL's birth in 1999, but when I joined staff@mozilla.org 25 years ago I worked with OEOne, an ISV delivering a full Linux front-end using XUL. That was late 2000, maybe early 2001. A year or so before them, our parent company, AOL, began working with OEMs on XUL-based thin clients and AOL even re-built Prodigy (the low tier trial run for the AOL main client) with Gecko and XUL in 2001-2002. And of course, Mozilla itself shipped on a nearly a dozen platforms in 2002, and entirely XUL. XUL was born in 1998 and the spec was finalized in 2001.
    - DonHopkins 1y ago
      I worked on the cross platform TomTom Home content management app in 2007-2008, which used XULRunner and XP/COM extensively. But XULRunner only really existed to serve Mozilla's Firefox web browser, and anyone using it for their own applications, like TomTom Home or Songbird, was on their own without any support. Mozilla didn't take our XULRunner PRs seriously, or put much more than promises and lip service into XULRunner supporting other applications than Firefox. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TomTom#Support_applications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TomTom#Support_applications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songbird_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songbird_(software) If Mozilla was actually serious about supporting XULRunner for anything but Firefox, then it might have taken the place of Electron a lot earlier that Electron's release in 2013. That was a huge missed opportunity and tragedy of broken promises and wasted effort. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7601083 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7601083 >I first looked at Red Swoosh and its Firefox extension, FoxTorrent. It would have been ideal, since we using the xulrunner platform for TomTom Home, but Akamai acquired Red Swoosh, and it vanished without a trace. [...] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20140349 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20140349 >One way to get Akamai to unilaterally lower their bandwidth prices is to threaten to use BitTorrent instead. [...] >TomTom had an "iTunes-like" desktop content management and device control desktop app called TomTom Home, which was implemented in xulrunner (the underlying framework of Firefox and Thunderbird, kind of a predecessor to Electron for writing cross platform desktop apps in JavaScript with C++ XP/COM plugins). >The first thing I tried was to make an XP/COM plugin out of the LibTorrent library. That worked ok, but the idea of increasing the size and complexity of what was already essentially a web browser with a whole bunch more complex code that does lots of memory allocation and networking all the time, didn't seem like a good design. This was long before Firefox supported multiple processes, so the same app handing bittorrent would bloat the app and degrade the user interface responsiveness. >However RedSwoosh, FoxTorrent and BitTorrent DNA all ran in separate processes that just handled all the BitTorrent stuff, and that you could talk to via https (to stream the file with a special url, and retrieve progress telemetry on another url). And it's incredibly easy to integrate xulrunner or any web browser with those servers via http, so no C++ XP/COM plugin required. >Another issue is that you don't want every application to have its own BitTorrent client built in, or you will trash the network and disk, since otherwise they would compete for resources. It needs to be a centralized a system service, shared by any app that needs it. >BitTorrent DNA worked nicely that way. And it could fall back to the CDN to download at full speed if there weren't enough seeders. Also unfortunately, XULRunner was in no shape to run on mobile or embedded devices, so we ended up running WebKit on the TomTom embedded Linux devices, instead of trying to shoehorn Mozilla into small mobile devices. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34227548 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34227548 >Both Chrome and Safari were based on WebKit (which itself started as a fork of KDE's KHTML and KJS libraries), which a lot of other vendors use too. >Although Chrome eventually diverged years later with the development of Blink, Chrome was the result of a multi-company, industry-wide unification strategy on WebKit, the core of Safari. [...] >Mozilla was in no shape to run on mobile or embedded devices (and still isn't afaik), while WebKit ran quite nicely on mobile and embedded devices, thank you. And as we all know, Android is as important to Google as iOS is to Apple. >So there was really no chance of either of them (or any other of the many companies interested in mobile and embedded devices, like TomTom for example) ever building on top of Mozilla/xulrunner.
- gmueckl 1y ago
  QML copies many core ideas from JavaFX (released 2008) and Microsoft's WPF (released 2006). Microsoft's XAML for declarative UIs is the most reused/reimplemted approach among this bunch. Its variants are in WPF, Silverlight, WinUI, Avalon and Uno.
- asadotzler 1y ago
  Flex and other "new" web features are direct decedents of Mozilla's XUL, from 25 years ago.
judell 1y ago
I am not sure about prior art but the ability to mix built-in and user-defined components, and fluidly refactor the mixture, feels very powerful to me.
cryptonector 1y ago
What we've been seeing for a while is that the rate of wheel reinvention has skyrocketed. Just look at the PostgreSQL ecosystem and you'll see many libraries for each feature you might be interested in.
- larodi 1y ago
  What is that gets reinvented in Postgres sorry I can’t get it? Can u please care to explain?
  - cryptonector 1y ago
    Not in PG but in its ecosystem. Just look at any "awesome PostgreSQL" listings, like: https://github.com/pg-tr/awesome-postgres https://github.com/dhamaniasad/awesome-postgres
    - larodi 1y ago
      Merci. Awesome indeed.
refulgentis 1y ago
I'm curious, not talking down: would you be interested in sharing your age and/or years of experience coding, and if you're feeling very generous, the languages youve written code in for more than 2+ years? I'm 37, 17 years full-time-ish, VB6, ObjC, Java, Dart. I'm asking, I guess, because I feel like I've seen these concepts before in pre-iOS ObjC, and Java, and IIRC a good chunk of the late 90s and early 00s was obsessed with doing this stuff in XML. I barely remember, in my hobbled, probably incorrect, perception the ideas are old enough to that I am a bit flummoxed at how to interlocute with the idea that they're novel breakthroughs. I'm ashamed to admit I thought the page was parodying this concept from back then of anything + XML = awesome. Im admitting it to give a concrete sense of how my subconscious processed this as settled territory.
- eyelidlessness 1y ago
  In order: 42 years old; 17 years (at least? starting to lose count!); PHP -> JavaScript -> Clojure/ClojureScript -> TypeScript. Perhaps more pertinent to the topic, in my last job I implemented the bulk of an XForms implementation. Pertinent because XForms has a lot of conceptual overlap with what I’ve seen in XMLUI so far. I think it’s worth clarifying my point above with that context: it isn’t the concept that I find novel, at all. It’s the sheer depth and breadth of declarative expressiveness that I see in the examples. Maybe the best way I can put it is that what seems novel to me is how much novelty it appears to enable, before breaking through the abstraction to give it more capabilities.

j1elo 1y ago

Speaking of expressing a UI declaratively, and composition with web components... as a former Qt/QML dev, I always felt like Web innovations of the last decade are just rehashes of the inspirations and ideas behind what Qt's QML started offering already since 2010. Things like CSS Grid, which was a great and celebrated new toy in 2017, but as foreigner from the Web world, I still remember how I read those news and didn't know if they were kidding. To the standards body that may concern: just copy QML and standardize it already! :-)

DonHopkins 1y ago
XULRunner's initial release was in 2006. OpenLaszlo was released in 2001. Garnet was released in the early 90's. Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad (aka Robot Draftsman) was created in 1963, and inspired the Visual Geometry Project in the mid 1980's and The Geometer's Sketchpad in 1995 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44627569 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44627569 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XULRunner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XULRunner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenLaszlo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenLaszlo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Geometer%27s_Sketchpad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Geometer%27s_Sketchpad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sketchpad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sketchpad
- JodieBenitez 1y ago
  Laszlo... I remember this one, dipped my toes in it, like many, many other GUI tools. I've been using the same backend framework for 20 years with no need to change but I can't decide which frontend GUI library I should invest my time for the future. It all looks like constant rehashing of the same ideas but with limited lifespan.
- cyberax 1y ago
  There was also HTMLayout released around 2003.
- asadotzler 1y ago
  XUL applications outside of Mozilla existed well before XULRunner (itself barely a product.) Of course Mozilla was the main client at XUL's birth in 1999, but when I joined staff@mozilla.org 25 years ago I worked with OEOne, an ISV delivering a full Linux front-end using XUL. That was late 2000, maybe early 2001. A year or so before them, our parent company, AOL, began working with OEMs on XUL-based thin clients and AOL even re-built Prodigy (the low tier trial run for the AOL main client) with Gecko and XUL in 2001-2002. And of course, Mozilla itself shipped on a nearly a dozen platforms in 2002, and entirely XUL. XUL was born in 1998 and the spec was finalized in 2001.
  - DonHopkins 1y ago
    I worked on the cross platform TomTom Home content management app in 2007-2008, which used XULRunner and XP/COM extensively. But XULRunner only really existed to serve Mozilla's Firefox web browser, and anyone using it for their own applications, like TomTom Home or Songbird, was on their own without any support. Mozilla didn't take our XULRunner PRs seriously, or put much more than promises and lip service into XULRunner supporting other applications than Firefox. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TomTom#Support_applications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TomTom#Support_applications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songbird_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songbird_(software) If Mozilla was actually serious about supporting XULRunner for anything but Firefox, then it might have taken the place of Electron a lot earlier that Electron's release in 2013. That was a huge missed opportunity and tragedy of broken promises and wasted effort. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7601083 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7601083 >I first looked at Red Swoosh and its Firefox extension, FoxTorrent. It would have been ideal, since we using the xulrunner platform for TomTom Home, but Akamai acquired Red Swoosh, and it vanished without a trace. [...] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20140349 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20140349 >One way to get Akamai to unilaterally lower their bandwidth prices is to threaten to use BitTorrent instead. [...] >TomTom had an "iTunes-like" desktop content management and device control desktop app called TomTom Home, which was implemented in xulrunner (the underlying framework of Firefox and Thunderbird, kind of a predecessor to Electron for writing cross platform desktop apps in JavaScript with C++ XP/COM plugins). >The first thing I tried was to make an XP/COM plugin out of the LibTorrent library. That worked ok, but the idea of increasing the size and complexity of what was already essentially a web browser with a whole bunch more complex code that does lots of memory allocation and networking all the time, didn't seem like a good design. This was long before Firefox supported multiple processes, so the same app handing bittorrent would bloat the app and degrade the user interface responsiveness. >However RedSwoosh, FoxTorrent and BitTorrent DNA all ran in separate processes that just handled all the BitTorrent stuff, and that you could talk to via https (to stream the file with a special url, and retrieve progress telemetry on another url). And it's incredibly easy to integrate xulrunner or any web browser with those servers via http, so no C++ XP/COM plugin required. >Another issue is that you don't want every application to have its own BitTorrent client built in, or you will trash the network and disk, since otherwise they would compete for resources. It needs to be a centralized a system service, shared by any app that needs it. >BitTorrent DNA worked nicely that way. And it could fall back to the CDN to download at full speed if there weren't enough seeders. Also unfortunately, XULRunner was in no shape to run on mobile or embedded devices, so we ended up running WebKit on the TomTom embedded Linux devices, instead of trying to shoehorn Mozilla into small mobile devices. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34227548 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34227548 >Both Chrome and Safari were based on WebKit (which itself started as a fork of KDE's KHTML and KJS libraries), which a lot of other vendors use too. >Although Chrome eventually diverged years later with the development of Blink, Chrome was the result of a multi-company, industry-wide unification strategy on WebKit, the core of Safari. [...] >Mozilla was in no shape to run on mobile or embedded devices (and still isn't afaik), while WebKit ran quite nicely on mobile and embedded devices, thank you. And as we all know, Android is as important to Google as iOS is to Apple. >So there was really no chance of either of them (or any other of the many companies interested in mobile and embedded devices, like TomTom for example) ever building on top of Mozilla/xulrunner.
gmueckl 1y ago
QML copies many core ideas from JavaFX (released 2008) and Microsoft's WPF (released 2006). Microsoft's XAML for declarative UIs is the most reused/reimplemted approach among this bunch. Its variants are in WPF, Silverlight, WinUI, Avalon and Uno.
asadotzler 1y ago
Flex and other "new" web features are direct decedents of Mozilla's XUL, from 25 years ago.

judell 1y ago

I am not sure about prior art but the ability to mix built-in and user-defined components, and fluidly refactor the mixture, feels very powerful to me.

cryptonector 1y ago

What we've been seeing for a while is that the rate of wheel reinvention has skyrocketed. Just look at the PostgreSQL ecosystem and you'll see many libraries for each feature you might be interested in.

larodi 1y ago
What is that gets reinvented in Postgres sorry I can’t get it? Can u please care to explain?
- cryptonector 1y ago
  Not in PG but in its ecosystem. Just look at any "awesome PostgreSQL" listings, like: https://github.com/pg-tr/awesome-postgres https://github.com/dhamaniasad/awesome-postgres
  - larodi 1y ago
    Merci. Awesome indeed.

refulgentis 1y ago

I'm curious, not talking down: would you be interested in sharing your age and/or years of experience coding, and if you're feeling very generous, the languages youve written code in for more than 2+ years? I'm 37, 17 years full-time-ish, VB6, ObjC, Java, Dart. I'm asking, I guess, because I feel like I've seen these concepts before in pre-iOS ObjC, and Java, and IIRC a good chunk of the late 90s and early 00s was obsessed with doing this stuff in XML. I barely remember, in my hobbled, probably incorrect, perception the ideas are old enough to that I am a bit flummoxed at how to interlocute with the idea that they're novel breakthroughs. I'm ashamed to admit I thought the page was parodying this concept from back then of anything + XML = awesome. Im admitting it to give a concrete sense of how my subconscious processed this as settled territory.

eyelidlessness 1y ago
In order: 42 years old; 17 years (at least? starting to lose count!); PHP -> JavaScript -> Clojure/ClojureScript -> TypeScript. Perhaps more pertinent to the topic, in my last job I implemented the bulk of an XForms implementation. Pertinent because XForms has a lot of conceptual overlap with what I’ve seen in XMLUI so far. I think it’s worth clarifying my point above with that context: it isn’t the concept that I find novel, at all. It’s the sheer depth and breadth of declarative expressiveness that I see in the examples. Maybe the best way I can put it is that what seems novel to me is how much novelty it appears to enable, before breaking through the abstraction to give it more capabilities.