for websites, sure

but not for UIs

well a website is a form of UI, no?

i would say a website is more of a document and html is more of a document model markup lang

doesnt mean you cant build UIs with html5 ofc

as always, Ian is more articulate than me :D

What I would say is that XML in the form you need to build UIs in HaxeUI is very simple - simpler probably that HTML5 actually in the bits you use. XML itself is very powerful with many parts, and widely used and doc'd and exampled in industry. There is tons out there and lots of people use it. I initially began using HaxeUI coding pieces. I switched to using XML as it is just so much simpler (despite what I've done to it 🙂 ) to work with and modify. Why not take the XML method out for a spin and see how you like it ?

html is only more popular because its required for web browsers anyways

But it doesn't change the fact it's used more often rather than xml.

Maybe but why does that matter ? In HaxeUI it's the data-driven design option. Why make it hard I guess ? The big deal really is that you can write component by component pieces and assemble them - so it's very easy to work with and rework/refactor

also consider that using haxeuis xml is basically free. the only thing you have to do is tell haxeui to read the file at runtime. to use html, you would have to implement creating the components yourself

put it this way, whether it's html or xml, the requirement for guidance on use won't be any different

html having "more" resources won't make any difference to people playing your game cause people are just going to look at what your game provides

also you made it seem like this is just for extreme customization. if that is the case, do you expect most players to mess with the files to change what the ui looks like? most players probably wont want to touch the files, and the ones that do are most likely to just use a theme/whatever someone else created and not modify it themselves

The game is all about coding, so I guess they would.

i still think there is a fundamental misunderstanding about what html markup and xml are and what haxeui does with xml (and why it wouldnt make sense for haxeui to use html markup to build UIs)

added some new examples to the explorer:

nice additions

the html discussion gave me a really stupid idea

web browser, but it uses haxe ui xml instead of html

would be too good to be true

i hate web!!

Better than the reverse where haxeui use html and rewrites gecko ig 🙂

Though not really as they are aimed at different things

Why not?

Well you could I suspect - was thinking about this earlier. I'd like Ian to expand on the distinction between what HTML and XML is. I tend to think of XML as a data format and HTML as a markup lang. Part of the problem I suspect is that HTML has taken on a lot of UI features over the years, and the combination of it with JS has only enhanced this. XML is nicely backend - implementation if you like - agnostic. Backends can then provide any implementation they want, HTML being one, Heaps another and so on. I tend to feel if you start with HTML you will give priority to the mental model of a specific backend and will then kind of translate from one impl to another in the backends rather than from a specification to an impl as it were. My two cents. Like I said I would like to hear more from Ian on precisely the distinction he is making vis a vis the nature of XML and HTML.

well, xml is used by haxeui as a data format for creating instance of haxeui components, html is a document model for describing webpages... they are pretty different, as i mentioned how would you do:

xml
<tabbar .... />

in html... there is no "tabbar" tag... arguably there could be with new web components, but thats html becoming more xml like, not the other way around

> The key difference between HTML and XML is that HTML displays data and describes the structure of a webpage, whereas XML stores and transfers data. XML is a standard language which can define other computer languages, but HTML is a predefined language with its own implications.

yeah ok - that's about what I was getting at. The problem is that HTML has accreted a ton of UI widgets over the years and embedding JS has muddied the distinction between markup and UI. Also with web-components you should get some of the same support as you get with the XML component stuff. But certainly the point about HTML having it's own defined lang is a big one - I thought about that earlier - that seems the biggest problem.