So I don't have to work with HTML/CSS then? I seem to have a disorder which makes me dislike a separate language for layout/design than the one I'm writing the other code in. And although I do a lot of it and am good at it, I don't like HTML/CSS at all; I have not seen a real world case outside documents and informative sites (which are documents anyway) where I could not build a more robust (and a lot faster) interface in less time in Cocoa with Objective C / C# / C++. No clue what is wrong with people trying to do everything in HTML/CSS. </rant>
Anyway; being lazy; so this is kind of a GUI layer on top of HTML/CSS?
This is nothing like XUL. It's just some abstraction layers written in C++. The hygiene from the Chromium side is that it allows us to share some code with abstractions we already have for the web platform.
Chrome UI on Windows, ChromeOS and soon Linux are comprised of a few layers:
Views (widget toolkit abstraction) - tabs, buttons, textfields, etc.
Aura (window/"native widget" abstraction, event dispatching, what most code at layers above would consider to be the XWindow, except the XWindow is abstracted (and there is only one XWindow per top level browser window))
CC - (Chrome Compositor, also used for web content.)
They're all in native code since being able to drop down to the metal (& grab the app's toplevel XWindow) is often useful when building a desktop UI. HTML/JS/CSS binding to CC is limited to Blink.
OSX users are perceptive enough about the nuances of cocoa that recreating all the UI quirks and what not is a huge undertaking. If I had my sanity intact, I would just stick to cocoa.
I used to be more religious about this sort of thing... but the religion falls apart even on OS X when you realize that even WebKit implements its own copy of the native controls that can appear in web content - so that they can be transformed and animated using CSS.
Feel the same way, however most of the projects we are asked to work on require web UIs. :(
If the browsers used something like XAML, with proper support for components, it would be great.
Maybe web components will eventually get us there, but it is surely a very bumpy road to get to something that only now starts to resemble Smalltalk/Lisp environments.
Anyway; being lazy; so this is kind of a GUI layer on top of HTML/CSS?