Authors CurseForge

XML was slower/used more memory in the past. Its faster now. It also does not need to be as verbose as blizzard tends to write it

This code:

<FontString name="$parentHotKey" inherits="NumberFontNormalSmallGray" justifyH="RIGHT">
	<Size>
		<AbsDimension x="36" y="10"/>
	</Size>
	<Anchors>
		<Anchor point="TOPLEFT">
			<Offset>
				<AbsDimension x="-2" y="-2"/>
			</Offset>
		</Anchor>
	</Anchors>
</FontString>

Can become:

<FontString name="$parentHotKey" inherits="NumberFontNormalSmallGray" justifyH="RIGHT">
	<Size x="36" y="10"/>
	<Anchors>
		<Anchor point="TOPLEFT">
			<Offset x="-2" y="-2"/>
		</Anchor>
	</Anchors>
</FontString>

For example.


You also get that sexy "inherit multiple templates" thing, too.

Quote from Tuller

XML was slower/used more memory in the past. Its faster now. It also does not need to be as verbose as blizzard tends to write it

Although it appears in their Schema, they never used <RelDimension> tags, and I suspect it didn't work. They changed the schema around 2.0 to allow tags to directly have the dimension as parameters. Since then, they have been converting the existing XML documents as they modify them to use the new format.

Quote from Phanx

Lua gets that too. ;)

But you need to use XML for those templates :P

Am I the only one that finds frames in lua easier to read than xml?

Quote from Ackis

Am I the only one that finds frames in lua easier to read than xml?

See posts on page 1 ;)

With a real xml editor, xml is easier to work with than Lua. (www.altova.com)

I think of xml frames in the same way as windows "resources" for an application, they are very similar to DIALOG resources.

I've been hand coding all my html for years, and I feel the same way as Phanx... I've run into a lot of stuff that other people did in WYSIWYGs. DreamWeaver (under certain circumstances) has the possibility of generating fairly clean code, but that is quite variable. It's still way better than MS Word's idea of HTML.

There are two places where I will often give in and use a WYSIWYG: MS Visual Studio (for Windows forms design) and NetBeans (when building Forms-based Java applications). In both those cases, I often find that I do the basic design with the WYSIWYG, but I still usually end up hand-tweaking a lot of little things before I'm done.

So far, the only WOW GUI I've done at all has been using AceConfig-3.0 and the AddToBlizOptions stuff to build a really nice set of menus into the Blizzard default Addon Config section. (Oh, and I've used the UIErrorFrame a couple times for quick alerts.)

If there was a decent visual tool for the XML frames, I might be tempted to play with it to generate some GUI, but I'd end up hand-coding more and more of it till I was only using the editor to view how my hand-coded stuff was looking outside of the WOW interface.

Actually, that's the tool I'd really like: A WOW client simulator that would let me see how my GUI would look without having to load the game. I can often steal a few minutes around lunch time to poke at code, but with all the dry-coding I have to do, I'm always afraid to make too many changes when I'm not able to change/test/fix/test/fix/PROFIT :)

Quote from Thaoky

About the wow client simulator, I'm behind DigitalSorceress on this one, I'd love to see that :)

I'd be really surprised if Blizzard didn't have some sort of in-house WYSIWYG tool. Sadly, I doubt they'd ever make it available to the public.