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April 21, 2005
World of Warcraft uses XUL for its interface? (Update: Not true)
I was messing with World of Warcraft today and I got an interface error - much to my surprise, it seemed to be an XUL menu error. It appears as though Blizzard used XUL to create a cross platform UI for WoW.
Considering the popularity of the game, that is pretty cool for Mozilla.
(Note: I might have misread the error, so I'm saying I THINK WoW is using XUL - I can't confirm that)
Update: WoW does not use XUL directly if at all. I was wrong.
Posted by josh at April 21, 2005 7:20 PM
Comments
There are several xul like languages around (use XML to generate the interface).... though none I believe are open.
As I recall even Null Soft was working on one.
Posted by: Robert Accettura at April 21, 2005 8:04 PM
The error I saw started with "XUL:" - so I'm basing my guess on the actual acronym XUL appearing there, not on the fact that it looked like an XML interface language.
Posted by: Josh Aas at April 21, 2005 8:24 PM
"There is no banshee, they is only Zuul." :)
http://www.xulplanet.com/ndeakin/article/12/
Posted by: Gavin Sharp at April 21, 2005 8:40 PM
It uses a custom XML namespace that could itself be based off XUL, I guess.
The interface has its own XML, the scripting is done via a custom Lua.
Posted by: Quark at April 21, 2005 9:23 PM
Quark - how did you determine that?
Posted by: Josh Aas at April 21, 2005 10:15 PM
There is quite a lot of documentation about the XML+Lua UI in WoW and there is a vibrant extension community around it and it is all supported by Blizzard. See the forums for WoW and there are groups covering this topic.
Posted by: Erik Arvidsson at April 25, 2005 9:43 AM
I know I'm horribly late, but ...
They almost certainly use chunks of the XUL engine. They'd be fools not to. That said, they've modifid the XML syntax a good amount. It looks like the biggest change is ditching XBL.
Blizzard reference: http://www.wowwiki.com/XML_User_Interface
XUL reference: http://xulplanet.com/references/elemref/
Posted by: Nikolas 'Atrus' Coukouma at May 31, 2005 9:10 AM