An idea for a new way of doing plugins

[Digital_Utopia]

HTML, .Net, Actionscript (more specifically Flex Actionscript) and WoW add-ons. What do all of these have in common? They all use some form of markup to display visual elements, while letting the code handle the logic.

It's something I think LotRO plugins is missing - perhaps it wouldn't add anything functional to the API, but I feel it would improve organization of code, as well as making UI creation a bit easier. Unfortunately, I don't have direct access to the API source code, and can't "hard wire" support for some kind of markup...but, it may be possible to do the next best thing.

If such markup can't be done outside of Lua; but, in theory, it should be possible to pull off an equivalent within it. Now, such markup would have to be written as a Lua string, but a combination of some form of markup parser/navigator class, in addition to a class designed to "translate" the markup into API code, should be able to do the job well enough.

Now, like I said - this is in theory, based off of what I know of Lua and the API. As soon as I get a reliable internet connection back (looking like the 8th), my first project is going to be testing the feasibility of this idea, with the hope that I'll be able to use such a setup with Palantir v2 - as the number of visual elements in that plugin - makes it a perfect guinea pig for the concept.

That being said, I'm interested in what you guys think about this idea - such as whether or not you think this would be an easier way of creating/laying out plugin UI elements than the existing way - or if you've seen some other method you think is better. If anybody is interested in such a method, let me know - and I'll go ahead and post my progress in this thread. If not, I'll just go ahead and play with it myself, and if it turns out to be acceptable, I'll probably just go ahead with it for my own projects, and leave it at that.