Web Applications with Mozilla's XUL?

An Anonymous Coward's idle musings inspires this query: "Web-based applications are a hot topic, right now, but sometimes HTML is too simple for your applications. Using a cross-plataform, more powerful and efficient UI like Mozilla's XUL would be great." XUL is more an interface description language rather than an application language, as it still uses Javascript to handle application processing. It would be interesting to see if future browsers (or future versions of existing browsers) would add XUL bindings for other languages like PHP, Perl, or even Visual Basic if such a thing interests you.

This is why developing for the web sucks

[pong]

Yes ... Lets try to introduce another web technology. (Sarcasm!!)

Everyone and their momma want their new and old software to be "web-enabled". What a great idea - someone invents a great concept for browsing hypertext documents with images, and hey... ho we all find ourselves being forced to develop applications for it! Of course web browsers, being web browsers, were never intended for running applications so the market place is now plastered with different technologies to make the web browser a better platform for .. you name it!

I hate developing for the web for two reasons primarily:

1. The user experience is seldom exactly what you want because, well.. web browsers are web browser - hypertext and images, remember! Good thing someone invented the web - writing gopher applications would probably stink even more.
2. You write the GUI in HTML or XML/XSL whatever, then you have your clientside scripting in javascript or vbscript. The server side is implemented in [customers bizar language requirement here]. Of course, as you are writing a state-of-the-art distributed application you use .... good-ol' one-way http for communication. WHAT A MESS! You have to master all these technologies and the tools/testing frameworks/IDEs to work with them. Good riddens

Am I the only one considering a change of career?