[scrollaway]

Much as i despise HTML UIs (see reasoning my rant below https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10655606), it is relevant and XUL is horrible.

I'm glad to see it disappear, it's one of those things the world doesn't need. A failed experiment. And an HTML UI for firefox makes sense in the long run.

Fun fact of the day: Did you know XUL uses DTD to store translations? That's right, if you have a string you want to translate, you just have to create a new XML element in a localized DTD file. Isn't that just a wonderful idea.

[DonHopkins]

I was just going to mention that, but you beat me to it. It's just bizarre to use XML external entities for internationalization.

I worked on TomTom Home, which was implemented in xulrunner, and I developed some internationalization/localization tools that had to deal with XUL DTDs as well as several other different and incompatible file formats for storing translations. I could never for the life of me figure out why they decided to use DTDs with external entities for translations.

[ZenoArrow]

XUL wasn't a failed experiment. From what I understand it served as the inspiration for some of the new features found in HTML. If that's the case it was a useful experiment.

[mercurial]

What do you think is so horrible about XUL, apart from XBL being really, really verbose? The basic UI part is fairly decent, IMHO.