Re: XHTML Applications and XML Processors [was Re: xhtml 2.0 noscript]

"Mark Birbeck" <mark.birbeck@x-port.net> wrote in message 
news:640dd5060608020950v10d3af9cr1c59bd4717c80cbd@mail.gmail.com...
>
>  it is possible to define
> interoperable, responsive, web applications.

With your world view, only by serving up XML documents that are tiny, and 
introducing everything else through scripting slowly, otherwise a user 
cannot be shown anything during the downloading phase, that is not a 
responsive web application.

> And this is not just hiding methods and properties, or tidying up CSS
> inconsistencies. Many libraries support things like registering for
> events on elements that haven't yet been loaded.

which is a completely crap idea, and all the implementations that do that 
are really bad - continually polling documents and all sorts of things, it's 
pointless to imagine a crap solution, when you could just use a good one, 
the problem is that people have promoted strange world views (e.g. all 
scripts must be in the head...)

> This means that I can
> write an addEventListener() call at the beginning of my document that
> refers to an element at the end of the document, and the Ajax library
> stores the reference and then keeps retrying, using a timer. (I know
> that YUI and Dojo do this, and I'm sure others do too.)

The Dojo home page locks up the most widely used browser in existence today. 
the Yahoo library is massive and completely full of junk, neither are things 
to promote if you're trying to demonstrate responsive web applications.

>In my mind
> that's actually a hack, but whatever you think of it, the important
> point is that it produces *interoperability*,

but it doesn't, the libraries you've described are not interopable, and are 
much worse than a simple
<input onclick ...> that they are replacing.

> since by using this
> technique you can now be sure that your event registration will
> happen, wherever in your document you place the call, and regardless
> of the processing model used by the browser.

Except you cannot guarantee it will happen before the user can interact with 
it, so it's not a responsive web application.

> But even more importantly, this technique is only necessary in an HTML
> document; in an XHTML document, as I have tried to argue, the XML
> processing model means that we need to assume that *conceptually* the
> full XML document is available to us. And happily, that also gives us
> the interoperability we need.

If we assume that, XML is not a viable language for the web, you cannot make 
responsive web applications like that - existing implementations do not 
assume that, so we're okay.

Jim.

Received on Wednesday, 2 August 2006 20:08:40 UTC