Very interesting idea because it can be much more platform agnostic then html. Ideally resulting in moving away from the html everywhere, which often means including a separate browser everywhere and non native UIs.
Would be great to see something like catch on for other chat platforms as well (e.g. Slack, Messenger, etc.). Being able to define a UI once for all those would be great.
I do a lot of thinking about conversation design "tooling" for automated agents and I found wrangling Adaptive Cards with "dynamic" content was a bit annoying since there's so many options. I needed a simple subset of functionality to cover most cases and to add features like tappable suggestion "chips"
I made little a utility called "Speedycard" which lets you "build" Adaptive Cards kinda like this:g
const myCard = new SpeedyCard()
.setTitle('System is ')
.setSubtitle('If you see this card, everything is working')
.setImage('https://i.imgur.com/VQoXfHn.gif')
.setInput(`What's on your mind?`)
.setUrl('https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GwjfUFyY6M', 'Take a moment to celebrate')
.setTable([[`Bot's Date`, new Date().toDateString()], ["Bot's Uptime", `${String(process.uptime())}s`]])
.setData({mySpecialData: {a:1, b:2}})
const fullCard = myCard.render() // JSON passed to an API/client
While I am convinced about the importance of conversation design and being thoughtful about this stuff sometimes it's convenient to just have a little form and the user adds their data and call it day
This is what HTML is for, and if you look at the schema it has many of the same element/container concepts that HTML has.
A subset of HTML designed for easy embedding, possibly removing features and quirks and allowing for a smaller and faster runtime was the goal of the project that directly preceded and led to Flutter. I wish that goal had remained so that we had a cross-platform UI runtime that was still lightweight on the web.
Probably the first thing to call out is that solving cross-plat UI in the general case is a non-goal for Adaptive Cards. It's not intended to replace e.g. ReactNative. Adaptive Cards exists to allow small snippets of card-like UI to be defined and shared across platforms.
The problem with using HTML (or a subset thereof) to solve this problem is that it necessarily requires HTML rendering on every platform you want to support.
If your intent as a dev is to integrate card-like experiences into an existing app, requiring a web rendering surface might be too heavyweight... and even if apps chose to adopt web rendering, there would still be the issue of getting styling to line up.
The goal of Adaptive Cards is to use a platform's native rendering and controls. Apps should get native performance with native styling.
Of note, these cards may not be originating from within your team, so there's no way to guarantee that card authors will make design choices that fit within the design language of your app. The solution is to only allow for semantic styling choices (e.g. card author can't specify "Ubuntu Mono" as the font, but can specify "monospace"). The app hosting the card gets to define how these semantic choices are actually implemented.
Seems incredibly like an intentionally style-less, script-less version of HTML: a tree structure of blocks, tables, lists etc with simple actions like "show", "hide" and "submit form".
Looks amazing! It's not every day I see a new technology that actually stands out. I could see a lot of apps being built largely as card galleries.
Also, "Experience Owners" should be nominated for Buzzword of the Year. It's so incredibly plastic corporate buzzword-y, but actually kind of does give a bit of a buzz when you see it.
It's a healthy project, with multiple development teams within Microsoft both using and contributing to it. If you scroll down the originally linked homepage, you see 4 Microsoft products that have used it, 3 of which are in active development today.
It looks like a lot of documentation is pointing to the wrong branch. It took me a minute to understand why I was looking at code that hadn't been touched in 2+ years. The docs are pointing to the "master" branch but everything has moved to the "main" branch.
https://github.com/miguelrochefort/awesome-adaptive-cards