Re: [whatwg] The src-N proposal

On Fri, 8 Nov 2013, Rafael Rinaldi wrote:
>
> It looks complex because it tries to solve something complex. I think 
> there’s no way to avoid verbosity to solve such thing.

The way you avoid complexity in such things is that you don't solve the 
overall problem, you solve small segments of the problem (e.g. in script 
or CSS), then pick the solution you want.

So for example, we could have a script to handle image grids, another to 
handle simple cases where as the window gets wider you display more 
context in the image, etc. If all these scripts have some common features 
they all need (e.g. the ability to work with pre-parsing to say which 
image they need first, so it can be fetched early) then we can provide 
that common core.

This is similar to AppCache vs Alex's ServiceWorkers. AppCache addresses a 
small set of use cases, probably not enough. ServiceWorkers provides the 
tools to address a lot of use cases, but isn't directly itself a solution; 
you use it to build solutions. Another example would be the WebForms2 
repetition model, vs Rafael's <template>. The repetition model idea solved 
some specific use cases, but trying to make it solve all use cases would 
be a hugely complicated endeavour and would be really ugly. <template> 
provides a tool with which you can build specific solutions, but isn't 
itself a direct solution.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'