Make the .ctor of the NavigableElement public

Description

Hello, The NavigableElement is a public class but we can’t inherit it because the .ctor is internal.

Looks like a trick to resolve sealed inheritance - you can do it, we not. Meanwhile, the NavigableElement implements a major feature - implicit styles, besides the shell navigation.

My question - Is there any reason to stop NavigableElement inheritance? Could you make the .ctor public?

Steps to Reproduce

So, why are we here:

• MAUI doesn’t support the DefaultStyle engine like WPF. We stopped using implicit style in our components and basically remove the whole XAML from our assemblies. There are performance and usage issues that we get tired to fix.
• There are special cases when we should set up the appearance of component parts, like DataGrid.ColumnAppearance. The ColumnAppearance a not presented in the visual tree as an element. It’s a “logical element” that provides a way to set the properties for drawing. In this case, we need implicit styles for our customers! It’s super flexible to write XAML like:

...
<Resouces>
  <Style TargetType="ColumnAppearance">
     <Setter Property="Background" Value="Red"/>
  </Style>
</Resouces>

We inherited our appearance class from VisualElement. It’s tricky and I don’t really like it:

• It’s WA and is not a quality solution. A lot of VisualElement properties (like Width, Height …) don’t work and are unnecessary.
• We faced some issues with HotReload in this case (I go to sending a separate issue)

Link to public reproduction project repository

https://github.com/dotnet/maui

Version with bug

6.0 Release Candidate 2 or older

Last version that worked well

6.0 Release Candidate 2 or older

Affected platforms

iOS, Android, Windows

Affected platform versions

iOS 15

Did you find any workaround?

No response

Relevant log output

No response

[Alexgoon]

Hello, The issue affects many APIs in our DevExpress product line. According to our experience, inherited properties that don’t work, confuse users, and we would like to avoid this. Would you please clarify if there is a chance NavigableElement to become public in the next release or should we rely on the fact that this won’t change soon?

[alexdi220]

Could you explain the plans for it? What are you think about how long it’ll be implemented?