While Slashdot is reporting on the Mozilla Developer Meeting, Suck is ranting about Mozilla's skins. Both articles talk a lot about Mozilla's XML User Interface Language, XUL.

Slashdot covers yesterday's meeting at Netscape between the company, Mozilla developers, and a number of others, including O'Reilly and Associates. The general drift of the article, which reads like loosely-written minutes in its detailed account, is that Mozilla is going to be presented and built as a Web-development platform more than a mere browser.

Some aspects of that platform irritate Greg Knauss at Suck. Announcing that "The tyranny of the skins has begun," Knauss complains that the XUL functionality provided by Mozilla is a problem, not a solution:

"Mozilla is an unmitigated usability disaster. Running on Windows, Netscape 6 looks nothing like Windows. Running on MacOS, Netscape 6 looks nothing like MacOS. Running on Linux ... well, no two Linux programs look the same anyway. In the end, Netscape 6 looks — and works — like Netscape 6 and only Netscape 6. By adding in all the flexibility of XUL, the Mozilla programmers have removed our ability to make the application use the native controls of the operating system. "

Slashdot also has an article commenting on the Suck article.