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I m not sure everybody knows how long this concept has matured, and I cannot prevent myself to quote XUL (I wrote thousands of lines of XUL and I loved how it was easy to create GUI for this time) About 20 years ago, in 1998, Netscape Communicator 5.0 was released as an alpha version and introduced the new toolkit to build the GUI of the browser with XML, CSS and Javascript.
Shortly after, the Mozilla foundation started and Netscape 6 was released. At this time, around year 2000, it was an outstanding technology, and it could have become the defacto standard for cross platform GUIs... Sadly, the Mozilla Foundation didn't sponsored this technology enough (in my opinion) to make it become the leader for cross-platform GUI development.
Because of lack of interest as a core technology by Mofo, the problems with tooling around build and packaging, documentation, legacy components, newcomers accessibility were not resolved. Firefox 57 removes the support of XUL for extensions but if I m not wrong it still uses XUL in some windows and the gecko engine (which render XUL). After XUL, we saw interests of this concept of XML-based toolkits by Adobe (Flex), Microsoft (XAML), Gnome (Glade), QT (QML, maybe the winner ?), HaxeUI. There are probably more. XUL is the oldest implementation of XML-based GUI toolkit that I know. There are probably some before. |
It really works well, and their Blend tool, makes it easy enough for even non-developers to design the UI component.