Re: Use cases

On Sun, Jan 2, 2011 at 7:51 PM, John Cowan <cowan@mercury.ccil.org> wrote:
> Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis scripsit:
>
>> HTML does not need another way to express "abstract behavior".
>
> True.  What I meant was that by using the element names to specify it,
> there was no place to express the actual semantics of the content.  But I
> find that the mechanism du jour for semantics is the "class" attribute.

Or RDFa, or microdata, or linked representations …

>> CSS encourages semantic (or "abstract behavior") markup, protecting
>> the uniform interface.
>>
>> CBS would discourage it by making it an extra step, damaging the
>> uniform interface.
>
> Very true.  But it would permit genuinely semantic markup (the model) to
> specify both its appearance (the view) and its behavior (the controller).

text/html has semantics ("abstract behaviors") appropriate to
representing documents/applications ("views" in your terminology).

We already have technology for declaratively generating such views from
arbitrary models (templating languages). We even have dedicated
technology (XSLT) for generating such views from models expressed as
XML.

So CBS wouldn't be adding anything here AFAICT.

If the root problem addressed by Use Case 4 is developers want easier
ways to generate views from models expressed in XML, maybe energies
should be redirected from fiddling with text/html parsing to
investigating how XSLT could be improved so it doesn't suck so hard. Why
don't more developers use XSLT?  Why don't any popular browsers support
XSLT2 natively? How about adding convenience APIs to XMLHttpRequest to
pass XML responses through a transform? How about designing HTML
features to bind parts of an HTML page to be updated from an XML backing
model using XSLT?

http://www.mail-archive.com/whatwg@lists.whatwg.org/msg21861.html

http://www.mail-archive.com/whatwg@lists.whatwg.org/msg22246.html

>> Witness all the inaccessible junk built out of divs.
>
> Inaccessible because the behavior is specified procedurally rather than
> declaratively.

In a sense.

--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis

Received on Monday, 3 January 2011 00:32:14 UTC