Re: Cascading and scripting (was: The concept of cascading) (fwd)

MegaZone wrote:
> >Still, I'm not really convinced that we need these "in-between"
> >standards like <FONT ...> and DOM to allow people to do interesting
> >things in wildly non-standard, non-portable, non-generic markup ways.
> 
> The DOM is portable.  It says nothing about what does the transforms.  That
> can be JavaScript, VBScript - or any standard scripting language that might
> be deployed.  

That's what makes it *non-portable* in my mind. What if my browser has a
different scripting language built in than the one in the stylesheet?

> JavaScript is a defacto standard now, fairly safe if you code well.

Where's the specification for JavaScript?

> I don't believe ISO is a serious player in the least.  They take far, far,
> far too long to develop anything.  By the time they produce anything the
> vendors will be five steps ahead of them.

Well, that's the fundamental difference between how ISO works and how
W3C works. ISO doesn't try to keep up with the vendors. They standardize
the ideas that their customers (industries, governments, large
organizations) want them to, and those customers pressure vendors into
accepting the standards.

Of course ISO is irrelevant at the level of the Latest KEWL features
from Netscape and Microsoft. But when we are talking about the standards
that will be the basis for transferring medical (or financial) records
between organizations, or encoding the documents that define our
civilization (and governance), I say again: "thank God that ISO is there
for sober second thought."

One interesting point: I can find substantially more information on the
Web about the upcoming revision to ISO SGML than the revision to W3C
HTML. As a citizen of a participating country I also think I have more
control over that process.
 
> >BTW, when will we get access to the DOM WG mailing list archives? The
> 
> I'm on www-dom, it has been basically silent for a week or so.  Things are
> just starting out.  The list was only recently created.

I believe that you (and I) are on the *public* mailing list. There is
also a *private* WG mailing list where the real work gets done. You and
I can yack on the public mailing list till the cows come home. I think
we'd be lonely there, though. I believe that the people on the private
list are not supposed to tell us what is going on.
 
 Paul Prescod

Received on Tuesday, 29 April 1997 00:29:07 UTC