Re: Questions on <datatemplate> (ref. call for exclusions)

On Sat, 7 Jun 2008, Bonner, Matt (IPG) wrote:
> 
> First topic is <datatemplate>. I see that this is marked as "Being 
> considered for removal" in the WHATWG draft, so I welcome any guidance 
> on its likely fate.

It (and the repetition section of WF2, also part of HTML5) are two ways of 
doing templating, but really there are dozens and dozens of ways of doing 
it. In my research on this I've come across a number of different 
mechanisms that can't be said to be any technically worse than what's in 
the spec, each with their own strengths and their own weaknesses. 
Similarly, people have given me many use cases that each need their own 
unique features.

Because of this, making any one mechanism an officially blessed one seems 
like a bad idea. It would only cater for a small fraction of the cases we 
want to cater for. There's no point adding features that aren't useful to 
the majority of people who need them.

I think therefore that the better idea is to look at the data templating 
and repetition model features, as well as the many other client-side 
templating ideas people have come up with for HTML, and find what 
features, if any, could provide an underlying infrastructure that could 
enable all of these features to be implemented easily by authors. That way 
we would help a much bigger fraction of the potential template authors.


As far the more concrete technical questions go, Philip's comments and 
explanations are right on the money.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Saturday, 7 June 2008 06:46:12 UTC