World of Warcraft: more XML programming

Sad_Bug_Killer

World of Warcraft is somewhat popular game that has the power to be enchanted with AddOns (just like the extensions for The Great Fox of Fire). And although the addons are to be written in Lua, there's still a bit XML involved:

<Ui xmlns="http://www.blizzard.com/wow/ui/"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.blizzard.com/wow/ui/ ..\FrameXML\UI.xsd">
	<Frame name="TheAddonFrame" parent="UIParent" hidden="true">
		<Scripts>
			<OnLoad>
				self:RegisterEvent("ADDON_LOADED");
			</OnLoad>
			<OnEvent>
				TheAddon.Events(event, ...)
			</OnEvent>
		</Scripts>
	</Frame>
</Ui>

The text in the <OnXXX></OnXXX> tags is Lua code. It's a shame they didn't use JavaScript as well.

And speaking of Blizzard, trying to open http://www.blizzard.com/wow/ui/ yields nice 404 page... with application/octet-stream content type. (I know XML namespaces are not required to be reachable, the content-type is the WTF here)

JamesKilton

A "somewhat" popular game? I hardly call 8 million subscribers "somewhat" popular.

And this is in no way a WTF. XML is used to layout UI elements, and it works very well. It obviously needs a link into some sort of scripting language (here Lua) for custom logic. Every mod needs the following two files: mod_name.xml, mod_name.toc. So for those mods that don't actually have a UI, you get a very simplistic XML as posted above.

Using your logic, the entirety of OpenLaszlo is a WTF, when in fact it's the best XML "programming language" (uses Javascript for logic) I've ever seen.

So no, not a WTF. Do a little more research before posting. Sorry.

PSWorx

Also, Lua and Javascript are similar up to a point where you can regex (many) Lua programs into equivalent JS programs and vice versa. Except that Lua lacks most of JS' illogical legacy stuff and added most of the more useful features much earlier than JS (like for example coroutines, packages and a consistent API).

I'd prefer Lua to JavaScript in any case.

mrprogguy

@JamesKilton said:

A "somewhat" popular game? I hardly call 8 million subscribers "somewhat" popular.

Somebody forgot to turn on his "ironic understatement" detector.

ShadowWolf

In what way is any of this a WTF?

I develop mods for WoW - the schemas come up using that URL in Visual Studio...