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 Saturday, 28 March 2015 01:51:46 UTC