Tim Bray suggests everyone should "check out apxl"
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Summing up, Quint commented that "this is quite disappointing design from Apple and a bit of a dirty XML serialization to me. XML is great for defining open and interoperable grammars, but what's the point of re-inventing the wheel here?"
[Eclectic]
I would link that to my previous comments about Safari: I'm still glad I didn't switch to a Mac, but thanks for the comment Mike and Steve Jobs' keynote: I'm glad I didn't switch.
My comment were about an implementation, Safari vs Mozilla. As Mike pointed out, having many implementations of the standards can be good, even if I thought that Apple would have made a better choice using Mozilla.
Antoine Quint's comment is more important: this time they uselessly reinvent a vocabulary for some functionalities that are already described in a standard, ie SVG.
One of Quint's comments:
The bottom-line is that Apple could very much have built Quartz2D on top of SVG rather than PDF. It is also worth noticing that Apple took part in SVG 1.0.
I don't criticize Apple for not chosing SVG over PDF (although I wish they would use SVG), but I'm puzzled by why they are not using it in the Keynote XML grammar. Let's take a look at a few things that stroke me as blatantly weird things:
But he finishes with the following comment:
Keynote does look real sexy though!
This helps me to sum up the ambiguous feelings I have for Apple: they're a systems company like Sun, but they target the consumer space. Being a systems company means that you build much more of what you deliver than pure integrators such as Dell. This also means that you have some proprietary stuff at many levels of the system. The whole art for a system company is to determine where to add the proprietary stuff in order to leverage standards AND add value.
Apple is innovative, make sexy products, and are sometimes at the origin of new standards (FireWire, ZeroConf). In the recent period they learnt how leverage the open source in a clever way (Mac OS X) and add value where it was needed (the UI).
The choice of one open source technology or another for the browser is after all not that bad: it just sucks for us web developer to have to deal with the quirks and bugs of yet another browser.
For the decision to create their own markup, APXL vs using SVG, it seems to me like a more important mistake, but I guess stylesheets will appear to go from one to the other.
They're innovative but make mistakes: so what ? I have a certain admiration for them for being innovative, and making mistakes is part of innovation. I just won't switch... yet :-)
1:39:13 PM Google It! 
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