If Microsoft want to use this, they need to use it. I was engaged in a 9 week battle with the MS Teams review team who were wholly and utterly incompetent.<p>They wanted fields added and moved that could not be because all of the layout was determined by the card and MS Teams own rendering (namely they wanted a settings link on a card list). It took three calls with their “engineers” to make them realise. Microsoft will never commit to something long enough for them to learn it internally so why should anyone else bother?<p>Rant over.
I get that XML is not cool anymore but JSON is really a terrible language to define user interfaces. This smells like using JSON for the sake of using JSON.<p>There's a reason why JSX (basically XML in JS) is so popular and not some JSON definition of HTML.
Even Windows apps have XAML so the UI doesn't have to be defined in C# objects.
This is so weird. Why would anyone adopt a UI framework from a team that can't even put together decent website for their UI framework?<p>The site shows exactly one example (a very ho-hum weather widget) and that requires squinting to see it among all the other things in the video. It shows no other examples, nor the code to construct them. Nor does their documentation home [1]. The text is also illegible with ultra-thin 200 weight straight out of 2013.<p>Like, there's hundreds of examples of developer tool sites that get the basics right, and they're not even about UI.<p>(normally its bad form on HN to comment on the site vs the content, but in this case the site really <i>is</i> the content)<p>[1]: <a href="https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/adaptive-cards/" rel="nofollow">https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/adaptive-cards/</a>
There's a similar project from Google: <a href="https://github.com/flutter/packages/tree/main/packages/rfw">https://github.com/flutter/packages/tree/main/packages/rfw</a><p>rfw is used by Google's Gemini LLM to generate UI.<p>rfw runs on the web/android/ios/macos/linux/windows, anywhere where Flutter runs.
I first heard of this project here on HN when I shared a project I finished with a friend to accomplish a similar goal for iOS widgets[1]. I still use a server-delivered JSON file for a live widget on my iPhone. I think there's a lot of value to this type of delivery even if you can't fully customize the UI.<p>[1] <a href="https://wd.gt/" rel="nofollow">https://wd.gt/</a>
I was on a team building tweet tiles[0][1] which required a cross platform UI system that would allow 3rd party developers to register a schema that would be used to render a custom UI under certain circumstances (usually by including a link in your post). We made it to beta, but never beyond given the internal turmoil.<p>We considered Adaptive Cards, but ultimately decided against it in favor of our own schema especially since we already had platform specific UI libraries.<p>Why?<p>Adaptive cards proved inflexible for uses not part of its core capabilities.<p>Adaptive cards doesn't allow for interactive elements IE charts or graphs with tool tips.<p>Adaptive cards doesn't appear to be well maintained or supported for ongoing future needs.<p>There were some other reasons but they are fuzzy a couple of years after the fact. This was one of the most fun projects I've worked on, I had to write a mini parser which is always a fun exercise, and I think it had massive potential. Would have been a very cool project to ship to prod fully but it wasn't meant to be.<p>[0]<a href="https://twitter.com/XDevelopers/status/1585707921433923585" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/XDevelopers/status/1585707921433923585</a><p>[1]<a href="https://twitter.com/ashevat/status/1562862418514288640" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/ashevat/status/1562862418514288640</a>
I've played around with Lowdefy, <a href="https://lowdefy.com/" rel="nofollow">https://lowdefy.com/</a>.
I kinda liked it.
A similar concept but uses YAML instead of JSON.
Someone showed up to say it would stick around (since 2016) 2 years ago.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31449834#31467664">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31449834#31467664</a>
This format is supported by Webex Teams, and I've used it to make alerts from Alertmanager actually readable. When it's used in conjunction with go templating, it can create some pretty useful results.
I don't know how many times we are going to try and define UI as data (XML/JSON/whatever). Has it not been sufficiently demonstrated that it doesn't really work in practice?