Re: complexity

On Mon, 19 Apr 2004, Tantek [ISO-8859-1] Çelik wrote:
> On 4/19/04 5:33 PM, "Ian Hickson" <ian@hixie.ch> wrote:
>>>
>>> Not every browser aims to be an "application plattform".
>>
>> Any browser that doesn't aim to be an application platform would find
>> itself severely locked out of large parts of the Web.
>
> This is silly.  It is like saying that any browser that doesn't aim to
> be an implementation of SWF would find itself severely locked out of
> large parts of the Web, since many many websites use SWF files and some
> even depend on them.

As someone who doesn't have a Flash player installed on his machine, I can
attest to the truth of that statement -- there are entire sites I am
unable to use because of my lack of Flash support. (Especially sites that
my friends point me to for entertainment purposes on a daily basis.)


> It is perfectly reasonable* to build a declarative-only browser engine whose
> aim would be to support interactive documents with declarative technologies
> like XHTML and CSS while foregoing all the complexities (and security and
> accessibility problems etc.) of DOM and scripting support.

It's amusing that you immediately assumed I was talking about scripting. I
didn't mention non-declarative technologies at all.

And an XHTML+CSS UA would still be a lot of work; more, I would postulate,
than a single person could accomplish while still keeping abreast of new
developments in those technologies.

(Not to mention SVG, XForms, XML Events, XPath, etc, that would be part of
a W3C, non-scripting-based, application platform environment.)


> *Try turning off scripting support in your favorite browser and browsing
> typical sites.  You'll find that most sites work just fine with scripting
> turned off.

Actually, based on both my personal experience and the volume of bug
reports in both Mozilla and Opera bug systems reporting sites that fail
due to broken DOM support, it would appear that a large number of sites do
not, in fact, work without scripting.

-- 
Ian Hickson                                      )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
U+1047E                                         /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
http://index.hixie.ch/                         `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Monday, 19 April 2004 21:19:23 UTC