Funny thing is, while this discussion was going on in email (with which I just caught up), I was once again running into an instance where I really wish HTML/CSS had a concept of scope. Not the same specifics are discussed here, but a similar underlying notion. In fact, this is one of the lacks I found astonishing when first coming fully acquainted with HTML 4 and CSS (hint: document. formName.elementName should strike you as wrong). When a page is built from inclusions gathered from multiple sources, there is (so far as I can tell) no notion of scope. This bound to be a problem as mashups become increasingly common. The notion of scope is not exactly new in computer science. The proposal in the WHATWG spec is not exactly what I was hoping to find. What I was hoping to find was named scopes. By way of a hypothetical example: <link scope="com.google.maps" rel="stylesheet" href=" http://maps.google.com/styles.css" type="text/css"> <style scope="com.google.maps"> ... my local enhancements to Google Maps styles ... </style> <p>Map of somewhere</p> <div scope="com.google.maps"> ... inclusion from Google Maps ... </div> <p>Map of somewhere else</p> <div scope="com.google.maps"> ... inclusion from Google Maps ... </div> The styles from the external site could be efficiently and minimally included once. (Where in the WHATWG proposal they may be fetched more than once?) The use of <div scope=""> makes that scope the current scope. Class names resolved within the scoped DIV will look first in the scope namespace (the usual rules for scopes). Oddly enough the scoped=boolean attribute triggers the same candidate-for-refactoring rule as function calls with boolean parameters. :)
Received on Sunday, 27 May 2007 23:24:42 UTC