European committee chair accuses Microsoft of hijacking the web

In a statement released this morning, Simon Awde, chairman of the European Committee for Interoperable Systems (ECIS), accused Microsoft of scheming to "hijack HTML" and wrestle control of the World Wide Web away from open standards. His specific beef: the XAML markup language, which will ship next week to consumers as part of Windows Vista.

Awde singled out XAML as an example of Microsoft’s dire schemes. "Vista is the first step in Microsoft’s strategy to extend its market dominance to the Internet," he said. "For example, Microsoft’s ‘XAML’ markup language, positioned to replace HTML (the current industry standard for publishing language on the Internet), is designed from the ground up to be dependent on Windows, and thus is not cross-platform by nature."

There are a couple of things wrong with this statement. Firstly, the ECIS makes no mention that XAML is based on XML, which is a text-based markup language just like HTML. This is not exactly "designed from the ground up" to be exclusive to Windows, even though the technology is used extensively in the .NET 3.0 framework, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), and other Vista subsystems, and the current implementations of XAML are only available on Windows.

But the most egregious error is the statement that XAML is "positioned to replace HTML." In fact it can do no such thing, as it is missing many key elements that web sites written in HTML currently rely on, such as forms for submitting information to a server. A Microsoft employee has blogged a complete list.

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