Very mixed feelings about XMLUI . I like the motivation and the overall approach to an accessible glue language, but just about everything about the implementation feels wrong. XML syntax is perhaps the worst - does anyone really want to stare at that kind of code?

recently I'd say "no", because xml sucks due to at least verbosity and lack of syntactic difference between lists and single-things (just like http GET parameters). but now I think syntax is only as bad as your IDE is, so I'd say "meh, whatever".

Good point, but the blog post does not suggest the use (or even existence) of an IDE that hides XML syntax.

I'd call "hiding" – DSL. "IDEing" – helping you to type as little as possible (autosuggest/complete) based on context you are (or cursor is) in, including but not limited to tag auto closing, tag and attribute names completion, valid attr values completion, cursor teleportation to next meaningful actionable place, moving blocks in and out of other tags, etc. With all these, having a little redundancy in tag names (open/close) is... meh, bearable. Also, this seems to be targeted at react+web, and keeping it similar looking makes some sense. meh, whatever