- From: David Dailey <david.dailey@sru.edu>
- Date: Mon, 26 Mar 2007 12:13:28 -0400
- To: James Graham <jg307@cam.ac.uk>,Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org>
- Cc: public-html@w3.org
At 10:50 AM 3/26/2007, James Graham wrote: >Ignoring the issue of whether a declarative syntax actually delivers >on the claimed ease of use, I don't understand how is this target >population of authors is supposed to develop the server-side >component of their web-app? They could, of course, get a third party >to implement that, but then why not also have that third party >develop the client-side? I feel like I must be missing something >trivial because my interpretation is that the proposal is aimed at a >user base that does not exist. A good question and a fair one, I think. Google's Dec. 2005 analysis (http://code.google.com/webstats/) of about a billion web pages revealed that about half contained a <script> tag. . It would be interesting to know how many of those are purely "presentational" in the sense of having no server-side return visits. If a page has <form> but no <script> then we may suspect (indirectly) that the page merely gathers info and ships it via submit to a server-side script (perhaps written by somebody else?). Google's data doesn't present that sort of cross-tabulation, though I'll bet if we asked real nice, they might generate such a report. I've certainly seen things like that -- my students do it from time to time. I'd guess between 2% and 5% of the scriptless sites might fall into the user base, but that's just an out of the hat figure. But it's not just the non-scripting public who "might" benefit. Side-by-side comparisons of the amount of code a big organization would need to build and maintain, would tend to suggest that nifty ways of doing this sans script could save some time and effort as well (subject to the constraint that the expertise base may be small). In the grand scheme of things, I suppose we'd need some real data on the efficiency of producing and maintaining code in a declarative environment. I went poking about the web but didn't find anything to help resolve the issue objectively. In the arena of declarative animation, I can point to things that take 1000 bytes of code in a declarative environment that would require a minimum of five times that much script to make things happen. That's a bit different than declarative approaches to simple form elements, but if we consider, among future form elements, declarative controls attached to sliders, color pickers, scrollbars, sketchpads, graph-editors, levers, pulleys and the like, reduction of script could be significant. regards, David Dailey
Received on Monday, 26 March 2007 16:17:04 UTC