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Showing posts from May, 2011

XAML is silly

Someone came into work today with a t-shirt saying: <canvas> ideas go here </canvas> I said it was HTML5, he said it was XAML, especially since it is a Microsoft shirt. Now, he is technically correct, but I hate the term anyway. This may not be entirely correct, but this is how I see the situation: Here's the thing, XAML means "Extensible Application Markup Language" - it's XML with an A inserted. What is it, though? How does it differ from XML? From what I can tell, it doesn't. XAML is just XML interpreted by a program in a particular way, it is a subset of XML. As a language, it doesn't differ or add anything to XML. The difference is in how the XML is interpreted by an external program. As such, XAML doesn't deserve to be called a different language. It's not like HTML - since HTML4, HTML has incorporated XML, becoming XHTML. But XHTML is visibly different to XML (as a major difference, HTML has attributes within the tag definition it

Updates

Right, first off, the third part of the video is almost done. Almost. I hope to finish it soon. Secondly, I have had another article published, which I've backed up here . Thirdly, I think I'm going to re-design the sidebar. Currently it's Javascript injecting into the DOM. I did that so that I could have one place to control it all from, and for the "expandy-collapsey" behaviour you need to use some kind of scripting language. However, people can disable javascript and some browsers may object to the way it is done, which means that some people are getting an inferior user experience. So, I would prefer to use some kind of server-side scripting instead, though with javascript for the expanding - perhaps, due to what I described before, I can start everything off expanded, then collapse it appropriately on page load, so if anyone has JS disabled they will still see all of the links. However, there is the possibility this will mess up the counter, as it might then