i’ve played with
xul

on and off

over the years

and while it’s easy to see the potential of a markup language for
describing user interfaces, my general impression has been that it
has been languishing on the vine. i think there are a lot of
reasons for this not least of them is the fact that there are some
fairly big disincentives for learning and developing a
mozilla

-specific technology [ no offense intended ].

so i was a bit surprised to see that
apple

has put a little

xul support

in safari 1.1 which comes with
panther

. and if that’s not enough, if looks like
microsoft

is putting together its own competing effort called

xaml

, which is sure to create a brave new world of competing
implementations and cross-browser compatibility issues. dave shea does a good job of summarizing the stakes.