Ideal UI markup language

Question

A friend of mine and I are looking to start a project looking into accessible user interface (for blind users) design. There are a number of projects making existing GUI's accessible by tagging them with audio information but we're looking to work from the ground up and actually take input from a ML and create an accessible application.

I'm trying to figure out what ML to use and am torn between three at the moment. The three I'm considering are XAML,MXML, and XUL. Currently, I'm leaning towards XUL because it's open but I was wondering if anyone could think of any pros/cons that I might be missing? I know that XAML is the most popular but does it do things that XUL can't? How similar are they?

I should add that whatever ML we end up using we will be extending the syntax so that we can provide additional information to the audio system.

Answer 1

I have already addressed this question to some extent here.

The pros/cons of XUL are:

• it's open
• it's cross platform
• it's well established with a large community
• it still basically has to be run in a browser that supports XUL (firefox)
• one of the comments from my question stated that XUL is a bad choice because firefos is buggy

The pros/cons of XAML are:

• it'll work on Windows/Mac
• it has a well established drag-drop IDE (VS 2010) to create GUIs
• it has a massive support community
• it's closed source
• it's a closed platform, IE. it not an open standard (not covered under ECMA like .NET and C#)
• there are legal issues regarding the use on non microsoft/mac plagforms (see my post)
• it requires either a browser with a the silverlight plug-in or the .NET framework to use it on the desktop
• it's developed/controlled by MS. This isn't an attempt to troll. Seriously, look it up on google. There are a lot of people who are suspicious of MS's intent behind creating XAML and it has garnered a lot of negativity behind the platform. It might be worth taking into consideration.

The pros/cons of MXML:

• it's cross platform
• it's closed source
• it runs on a closed platform
• it requires adobe flash (which, a lot of people claim is a dying platform now that Apple is rejecting to support/allow it).
• it requires a browser with a plug-in

Note: I can't really say much about MXML because this is the first time I've heard about it. I just pointed out the obvious pros/cons for completeness. I'll have to research it and add an entry to in the question I linked.