Re: [whatwg] HTML6 proposal for single-page apps without Javascript

I've been reading through the discussion thread, all of which seems to 
jump immediately into the weeds of specific details of the proposal.

I'm amazed that nobody has yet commented on the implicit premise, which 
I read as:
- JavaScript is a processing pig
- with the addition of a few, well-defined constructs to HTML, with 
support from browsers, we could do a lot of what we want (or what people 
are doing) - without the overhead imposed by JavaScript

To me, this seems like a very good thing.  It seems like:

- It's getting harder and harder to do simple things.  Too many 
JavaScript frameworks and libraries.  Too much complexity. Authoring 
should not require extensive programming skills. (Whatever happened to 
the read/write web?).

- JavaScript seems to encourage poor programming style, or at least 
resource-intensive programming.  It seems like 2/3 of the web pages I 
visit either freeze up, or just take incredibly long to load. Granted, 
that a lot of this is this stems from all the little click monitoring 
apps, and widgets, and who knows what else people put on their pages - 
and waiting for those various sites to respond - but it's the 
proliferation of more and more JavaScript that enables this.  (Which is 
not to say that some folks write well behaving pages, nor that 
JavaScript isn't useful - just that it seems to be leading to more and 
more problems).  One would think that commercial developers would know 
better than to release pages that drive users away, but no.

As to the specifics, it sounds like the proposal is to move some XML 
processing functions into the browser.  To me, Xpath, XSLT and XQuery, 
maybe a basic XML database - all in a browser, instead of server-side - 
sounds like a viable alternative to JavaScript for a lot of 
applications.  Implement first as a JavaScript library, as a test and 
transition path.  Could be kind of cool.  Might also end up being just 
as much of a processing pig as JavaScript.

Miles Fidelman


-- 
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   .... Yogi Berra

Received on Friday, 27 March 2015 20:04:50 UTC