I know, instead of creating just another blog entry about Microsoft's infamous XAML, I should rather be working on the Swixml 2 specification or even better continue working on Franklin, the elusive Swixml Editor. However, all the comments on XAML that I have read so far (Jeremy Allaire, Asterisk, Erik, Jon Udell, Gerald Bauer, etc.) seem to miss an important point: while XUL is for programmers, XAML is for generators.

Let me try top get my point across. I don't know exactly when this started but I think it must have been somewhere around 1997, when Microsoft launched Visual Studio 5, which included Visual-InterDev. Ever since Microsoft's mantra seems to be, let us do the coding and you programmers out there (you don't know what you are doing anyways) just do composition of components.

Design-time controls (DTC) introduced with InterDev and the ill-famed MFC wizardry are just two examples for MS's belief to be the only force in the universe able to write code.

If you take a more serious look at XAML it becomes very clear that this isn't anything a straight thinking human being could or would ever write. Putting lots of C# code, like event handlers for instance, into the XML descriptors makes them really hard to compile or at least type-check. All this is a clear indication that XAML is something that tools will create and developers never really have to look at. The tools will be created and sold by - yes, you've guessed correctly. The old Microsoft objective: "Extend, Embrace and Extinguish" still exists and is probably more real than ever.