Re: XBL is (mostly) W3C redundant, and CSS is wrong W3C layer for semantic behavior *markup*

To be fair, one issue that surprisingly no one raised yet (perhaps
correctly so since I am proposing analyzing XBL, not XUL), is that XSLT
will not give you the "neat" widgets in XUL.  Of course there is no reason
you could not use XSLT, instead of XBL, with XUL.  However, in fairness
must recognize that if one decides they must have XUL in any case, then one
of my points about browser independence (marketshare) is not as relevant.

However, my proposal was also to point out that there are other applicable
W3C standards (in process) for semantic widgets, such as XForms.

Also I think is important to re-emphasize that part of my current "plan"
(not quite a plan yet) is to make an implementation of DOM Views And
Formatting (a W3C proposal), so that I can build new widgets using XHTML
content trees, with the presentation dependencies abstracted and portable
as possible.  In this way, I hope to be able to have applications that run
every where, and not reliant on XPCOM or proprietary presentation
properties for new widgets.

Initially this implementation could be something simple (not a complete
browser) to serve my (and others) application needs.  And hopefully later
either incentivize an existing browser vendor, or complete it into a full
competing browser.  I am currently thinking of taking a drastically
different approach and develop this UA in PHP.  My theory is that speed of
execution is becoming less important than speed of development and code
reusability.  The more time someone has to focus on overall algorithms, the
faster the application will be.

I hope I made it clear that I have more than a passing interest in this.  I
agree we need UA implementations.  Theory is nice but doesn't mean squat in
real world, if you only have 2 viable browsers to choose from.

And also the lack of documentation at Mozilla on how to separate and use
for example NGLayout from the rest of the code base, is a driving factor in
just wanting to have something modular and understandable.  I dare guess
you could count on 2 hands the # of people who know Mozilla code base
thoroughly enough to dig in and fix something in any one of the
intertwinded modules.

-Shelby Moore

Received on Sunday, 29 December 2002 03:25:45 UTC