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It should be interesting to see if the Mozilla Foundation can push out a cairo-based Gecko 2.0 engine with SVG and foreignObject support before Microsoft gets XAML out the door with Longhorn.  Having SVG+foreignObject available in every browser would open up a lot of new potential for web development without flash.

From what I’ve read, Robert O’Callahan at X-Tech demoed SVG rotating a Cairo-rendered Google homepage.  Amazingly, you can still interact with rotated page as you would a normal page.  This looks like some of the stuff that has been coming out of the XAML camp over the last little while. 

Given these recent developments, you can safely draw equivalence between XAML-umbrella (Avalon/XAML/databinding/etc) and the XUL-umbrella (XUL, SVG, XHTML, XTF).  With the possibility that it’ll see the light of day before Longhorn does, it might end up taking a bite out of the already lackluster excitement over the next Windows release.

Having had a glimpse of both technologies, I’d have to put my support behind the W3C-based XUL technologies.  I much prefer the familiar CSS approach to the bizarre stylesheet-language-shoehorned-into-XML approach that XAML takes.  Dumping the powerful CSS language doesn’t make much sense - especially considering how cleanly SVG has embraced it.  I think that CSS can easily be extended to support some of the minor shortcomings without a total redesign.

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