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Comment by Aleman360 | Hacker News Reader

> After all in every native UI framework you have instructions to draw the widget IN your code -- not as some external additional technology. A widget's C/C++/Obj-C/Swift/Java/C# etc code encapsulates everything about creating it and showing it.

With the notable exception of Windows. XAML strictly enforces code and markup separation. It makes the View layer more toolable and easier to edit by designers who usually don't program.

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Thats not really true - you can use some pretty convoluted converters directly into the XAML and you can have those trigger arbitrary functions in your program through one-way binding.

I agree that XAML has the most mature concept, but it cheats by introducing the MVVM pattern, which performs some data mangling that would otherwise be part of the view. Not doing this, you'll end up with custom converters etc.

MVVM is nice regarding testability, but I find it to be overkill for most applications.

That is just inside of WPF-land, though. WinForms (which is still pretty excellent for quick-and-dirty GUIs) and other GUI frameworks are more on the classical model.

And UWP, which is the primary UI framework now.

Assuming that doesn't go the way of the host of other things that Microsoft has rolled out, spun their wheels on, and abandoned when it didn't take off.

WinAPI abides...

XAML is a properly parsed language defined just for this purpose though, whereas HTML + framework annotations inside element attributes is way more brittle.

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