Re: Scripting DTD's

----- Original Message ----- 
From: 
To: lhunt07@postoffice.csu.edu.au
Cc: www-html@w3.org
Sent: 11/14/2003 4:12:36 PM 
Subject: Re: Scripting DTD's


lhunt07@postoffice.csu.edu.au wrote:


> XHTML is called "Extensible HyperText Markup Language", NOT "Extensible HyperText 
> Multipurpose Language", and, therefore, it is designed for marking up 
> structure in documents only, and that's how it should stay. Scripting 
> XML documents is the domain of the Document Object Model [DOM] and the 
> scripting language standards, like ECMAScript [ECMA-262].

This is true. Even I will give that credit, except for one thing. The DOM would still be necessary,
otherwise it would be impossible to access elements. Unless my idea were taken even
further, and allowed people to create their own DOM, but that would get UGLY. ECMAScript
is supposed to be the great universal scripting language for the web, unfortunately,
few people use it. How many pages have you looked at that the designer used ECMAScript?


Most client-side scripting done on the web is done in ECMAScript or a vendor-implemented superset of it.  The two most used are JavaScript which is the Netscape/Mozilla implementation or JScript which is Microsoft's  Both JavaScript 1.5 and JScript 5.6 are supersets of ECMAScript 3rd Edition and if you take the junction of their capabilities, you get ECMAScript 3rd Edition with a few minor additions that are redundant but needed to support legacy code. In any case, most of the differences between Mozilla and IE in scripting come from the DOM level, not the language itself.
To allow people to create or structure their own languages by a Scripting DTD, would give
more power and flexibility to designers, weather they need a simple If...Then, for their page,
or a vigorous Do Loop Until. This would allow more cross-browser-scripting, without the
use of a language few people use. And if it were designed correctly, all browsers with
DTD or XMLNS capability could read and decipher it.
I fail to see what you could possibly want to be able to do, that wouldn't also open up gaping security holes, that can't be done by ECMAScript.  There might be a place for a less powerful and thus less complex scripting language, but that doesn't seem to be what you are aiming at.  In any case, beyond providing the hooks needed to attach scripts in some scripting language to the document to manipulate its DOM, there is no need in XHTML for a scripting language.