- From: Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org>
- Date: Thu, 10 Jul 1997 06:57:00 -0400 ()
- To: Scott Matthewman <scottm@danielson.co.uk>
- cc: www-html@w3.org, Jordan Reiter <jreiter@mail.slc.edu>
On Wed, 9 Jul 1997, Scott Matthewman wrote: > I do think, though, that the insertion of script events into tags > should be discouraged more firmly, to be replaced by binding from > a script in the <HEAD> element. Individual event attributes in > tags should be deprecated, to be replaced by a SCRIPT attribute, > in much the same way as the STYLE attribute can incorporate style > changes. The idea of a generic SCRIPT attribute was proposed a while back. It would have to allow for binding multiple events to handlers, since SGML doesn't allow you to have more than one occurrence of the same attribute in any given element. Another idea was to use an element to bind each event to a handler. This was rejected in favor of the explicit event attributes (simpler and already deployed). Some people suggested the goal of being able to provide editing enviroments for scripting that could track which handlers are used for which events, with out the need to understand the scripting language. Conceptually having an explicit list of events may make it easier to achieve interoperability by forcing us to define an language and platform neutral model for events. This is being done in the W3C Document Object Model working group. > Would this go any way to meeting your reservations? What it would > then be doing would essentially split a fully-laden HTML document > into three distinct sections: > > 1) Main document, including text, graphics and hyperlinks > 2) Style sheet, governing presentational output > 3) Script, governing interactivity. Styles are easier to share across pages. Scripts tend to be more specific to the particular page design. This encourages designers to place script statements in the page. The combination of onclick etc. attributes, script elements and linked scripts allows for an effective choice of where to place script statements facilitating the adoption a clean coding style. Bad programmers will always write messy programs though ... Regards, -- Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org> http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett phone: +44 122 578 2521 (office) +44 385 320 444 (gsm mobile) World Wide Web Consortium (on assignment from HP Labs)
Received on Thursday, 10 July 1997 07:03:28 UTC