Re: Directory Trees (fwd)

MegaZone wrote:
> 
> Once upon a time Tim Bagot shaped the electrons to say...
> >I think it would be useful to have another list-like element which could
> >be nested to produce collapsible trees. This would also be useful for long
> >lists of contents, permitting painless navigation of several levels of
> >subheadings.
> 
> That is active content - collapsing and uncollapsing lists.  Which is
> already possible with HTML+CSS+Scripting.  And will be standardized with
> the work by the DOM WG.

Interactive content is not necessarily the same as active content. We
don't typically use Javascript (et. al.) to traverse hypertext links or
manipulate radio buttons and I don't think we should have to to get
collapsible trees either. One important reason to avoid Javascript is
that it is not a W3C standard, Web UAs don't have to support it, and the
typical support for it seems to be horrendous. Client-side executable
content should be saved for things that are truly unpredictable and
unstructured, not merely things that vendors don't feel like
implementing. If we had had JavaScript 6 years ago maybe we really would
traverse links with tiny JavaScript programs. Yuck.

 Paul Prescod

Received on Thursday, 16 October 1997 20:48:18 UTC