Re: Moving XBL et al. forward

On 3/9/11 1:56 PM, Anne van Kesteren wrote:
> I do not think the XML-based version makes sense anymore. It's too
> complex and has always felt a bit awkward. A set of extensions to HTML
> or CSS would make more sense. I really quite liked the idea of using CSS
> and having some way of writing markup in CSS for this. Hopefully we can
> explore that somewhat.

I think there's an important point being missed here.

CSS application to nodes that are not in documents is not defined.  I'm 
not sure it's possible or desirable to define in good ways, even.

If we want to use something XBL-like that persists across nodes being 
moved in a document, it needs to not be bound via CSS.  If we want it to 
work for nodes that you created via createElement it needs to not be 
bound via CSS.

This has been the #1 lesson we have learned with Mozilla's XBL1 
implementation: the CSS binding mechanism has been the biggest problem 
with it, leading to weird behavior, gross timing-dependent hacks, and 
years and years of other problems.

Whatever we do needs to NOT use CSS as the binding mechanism.

-Boris

Received on Wednesday, 9 March 2011 20:48:58 UTC