Re: HTML as application manifest format

On 1 August 2013 18:57, Tab Atkins Jr. <jackalmage@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Aug 1, 2013 at 9:24 AM, Dimitri Glazkov <dglazkov@chromium.org>
> wrote:
> > On Thu, Aug 1, 2013 at 6:17 AM, Marcos Caceres <w3c@marcosc.com> wrote:
> >> Hi Kornel,
> >> Although I have complete empathy about your criticisms regarding JSON,
> it is actually quite fit for this purpose. Using HTML in the way you
> describe is kinda problematic, in that it could include scripts and other
> resources: basically, one would need to build a DOM to parse out the
> information - and even if scripts where not run, or resources loaded, one
> would still then need to make a special HTML just for this purpose (which
> would confuse people, as if you use HTML you expect to be able to have
> access to features of the platform). We are going to need a custom
> processor for the JSON format, but at least parsing is already done for us
> (as it was with XML, though sadly it seems that devs prefer JSON).
> >
> > FWIW, I tend to think that Kornel is hitting on something here.
> > Whether we want it or not, HTML is the Web's serialization format.
> > It's the one that helps us understand where hyperlinks are and how
> > resources are interconnected. Having a manifest in that format sounds
> > like a Good Thing.
>
> HTML is the Web's serialization format *for HTML, and other text-like
> things*.  As Kornel's example shows, HTML is *not* well suited to
> holding key/value pairs or the like; you have to hack them in via ugly
> <meta> values, and you don't get any of the benefit of the rest of
> HTML, because <meta>/<link> *is all you're doing*.
>
> This is quite different from Templates, because those are actually
> leveraging HTML, and so using HTML as the delivery format as well just
> reduces impedance mismatch.  I don't think that applies here.  JSON is
> the way the web does key/value transmission.
>

It's rather easy these days to embed key value pairs in HTML.  10s if not
100s of millions of sites do it using rdfa, schema.org, open graph protocol
etc.

The markup need not be ugly

Often it's as simple of adding a "rel" attribute in a tag (the key), and
then the value is put inside the tag.



>
> ~TJ
>
>