On: Microsoft abandon Metro name due to legal challeng...

[panacea]

Why can't a design language have a name (not necessarily a trademark)?

It can be used to differentiate it from what it's not. Programmers use names for everything, why can't a design have a name?

Apple had the aqua visual style, that is no longer with us.

[commandar → panacea]

Wouldn't this be more akin to Cocoa and Carbon in the Apple world? Metro goes a bit deeper than just the UI layer, as I understand it.

[jopt → commandar]

Not quite. Cocoa is really just an Objective-C API, though it's coupled with Aqua through Xcode and recent innovations like AutoLayout, whereby HIG policies are enforced by code. Metro seems to be more than that.