Ionrock Dot Org

Today I read on osnews about a project called MyXAML. If you have been following any of the discussions about things like Mono and .Net, you would have stumbled on upon XAML. What is very nice (and a little scary) is that XAML makes creating a user interface for a program similar to creating a webpage. Recently, many designers and gurus in the web design/development world have chimed in the concept of separating content from the design and layout. This tactic is meant to produce a longer lasting site that can be easily updated and changed. On a small side note, I agree with this ideal, although I think web designers cannot separate real content nearly as easily as developers, due to the usage of databases. XAML then will allow someone to create a user interface in an XML based markup language and do things like apply style sheets. This is very good because it should allow designers and user interface people the opportunity to create a great interface while keeping the functional aspects under the hood. What is scary is it will allow designers and interface people to the opportunity to create interfaces. Let me explain.

If a designer can do whatever they want with interface of an application you quickly begin to see what has happened with the web with regard to site design. There is no consistancy between sites. This makes sense on the web but on the desktop this should not be the case. The desktop should be a concise and consistant medium to work with. This could potentially make every app become an entity in itself with regard to user interface and design. Imagine every application having completely different skins like winamp with totally different interfaces and I think you see my concern. Now, this is not saying that I think this is a bad idea. I think the words of Spiderman's Uncle Ben say it best, "With great power, comes great responsibility."

I for one am very excited about this kind of technology because it will make creating an interface simple and easy todo without needing to understand every aspect of GTK+/# , QT, wxWindows. It also allows for an interface to be created without Visual Studio, another huge plus. Overall, this will really make programming about making things work and designing about making things easy to use which is a great thing. Of course, since we all know how many people read webmonkey and designed their first webpage, we can expect to see quite a bit of scary colors and hideous backgrounds come into play. Hopefully people will have learned from others and these kinds of evolutions can be avoided.