Re: Directory Trees (fwd)

MegaZone wrote:
> 
> Once upon a time Paul Prescod shaped the electrons to say...
> >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
> 
> ECMAScript is now a ratified standard.  The W3C was supporting the ECMA
> effort, so one hopes they will recognize the standardization.

Recognize? Probably. Mandate its use? In competition to VBScript? Maybe
not.

> I don't agree that active content should be part of HTML.  

First, I didn't say that it should be part of HTML. It should be part of
CSS and XSL.

Second, active content *is* part of HTML. What is <A> if not active
content?

> It is programatic, not structural.  

You claim so, but provide no evidence to back yourself up. Once again,
*interactive is not programmatic*. If you look at one of these CD-ROM
encylopedias, they are wonderfully interactive, but the absolutely do
NOT have programming code sprinkled among each of the articles. They
choose a certain set of interactive features and build them into their
"style language". 

> There are already vendors talking about
> releasing ready-to-use script blocks that you can drop into a document
> to get these effects.  

That's fine. We can standardize the behaviour of (some of) those script
blocks so that we can access them dependendably and declaratively from
CSS and XSL.

> Doing things piecemeal isn't worth it, when the
> DOM is standardized then we'll have a standard way to do this and much
> more.

One could argue that we don't need to advance HTML anymore because all
of HTML could be replace with Java applets. Why do things piecemeal?
Java already does everything anyone could want (look at HotJava).

It isn't a question of "doing things piecemeal" but of standardizing
common semantics to ensure interoperability and reliability. The
collapsible list is a widely used formatting semantic that should be
available everywhere to everyone, whether they want to use JavaScript or
not.

 Paul Prescod

Received on Friday, 17 October 1997 07:23:21 UTC