Blog

Here's a review of the XMLUI MCP server written by one of its primary users, Claude Code.

To try XMLUI frictionlessly you can run and modify demo apps online: xmlui-hello-world, xmlui-weather. But if you use one of these as a springboard for your own app you'll want to download and run locally. For that you'll need a minimal static web server.

In this post we'll explore the development of the blog engine we're using on this site. Our tagline is Practical User Interfaces Built Simply and creating this blog couldn't have been simpler. It's an XMLUI app built with a handful of core components (including NavPanel, NavLink, Pages, Page, and Markdown) and a couple of user-defined components.

The XMLUI docs are full of live working examples that use Playground, an extension package that runs XMLUI code inside an XMLUI app. We use playgrounds to bring component documentation to life. Why just tell you about the enabled property of a Checkbox when we can also show you, as in this live example.

In the mid-1990s you could create useful software without being an ace coder. You had Visual Basic, you had a rich ecosystem of components, you could wire them together to create apps, standing on the shoulders of the coders who built those components. If you're younger than 45 you may not know what that was like, nor realize web components have never worked the same way.