Re: Suggestion: <link rel="script">

William F. Hammond <hammond@csc.albany.edu> wrote:

> Scripts in any form are of interest only if I think
> that it is a good idea to allow unknown strangers to
> write programs that run on my computer.

Well, obviously.

(But crass though the majority of current scripts are, there
is undeniably *some* use for scripting.)

> Hello.

Morning!

fantasai <fantasai@escape.com> wrote:

> c) to make a link to a script (rel=script)
> Didn't quite make it to the prose...

Interesting! I never noticed that. It would indeed seem to
be a fairly obvious application of link.

Christian Wolfgang Hujer <Christian.Hujer@itcqis.com> wrote:

> So <link rel="Script" .../> could not be used anywhere
> throughout the document.

Indeed. The main use of mid-document scripts is
document.write(), which hopefully we can move away from
thanks to DOM Core; HTML can now be written to work
without scripting, and then transformed in the initialisation
phase of linked scripts.

There are of course drawbacks to this, principally that it
is hard in current implementations to associate additional
data that the script might need with document elements. XML
Namespaces would be a solution given UA support.

Another problem is that DOM selection methods are not as
powerful as W3 Selectors; particularly missed is something
like getElementsByClass - or a less HTML-specific version,
getElementsByAttribute.

Behaviours solve both these problems, but in a way I
personally greatly dislike. Keeping style, scripting, and
content completely separated is my goal.

On a related note, I find the <noscript> element completely
useless as it stands. There is no type attribute to say
which kind of script couldn't be executed, and even if there
were there are so many versions of ECMAScript that it's
generally impossible to know whether a script can or cannot
be executed before letting it browser- or object-sniff.

Anyway.

-- 
Andrew Clover
Technical Consultant
1VALUE.com AG

Received on Thursday, 23 August 2001 04:23:44 UTC