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

On Sunday, January 5, 2003, at 02:06 AM, Shelby Moore wrote:

>> CSS can decide how something will be rendered, e.g., for some made up
>> tag you could say:
>>
>> goo { display: table }
>
>
> http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/visuren.html#display-prop
>
> "Conforming HTML user agents may ignore the 'display' property."
>
> Thus CSS "display" controls semantics because it admits it is not 
> conforming.
>

This isn't an HTML tag though.  Perhaps I should have clarified by 
saying:

@namespace foo url(http://mymadeupnamespace.org/);

foo|goo {
	display: table;
}

> Also combining events non-orthogonally with the semantic 
> implementation is
> another major problem.  Much better if used the "id" binding of events 
> to
> semantics as in XEvents.
>

Events in an XBL binding are attached to the bound element just as the 
other sections of the binding are.   I'm not sure what you mean by 
"non-orthogonal."

>> Note that XBL itself is largely agnostic regarding how it is bound.
>
>
> Cool!  But the <handler> is bound non-orthogonally.
>

I don't understand this.  See above.  Why are event handlers any 
different from the other parts of the binding?

> And the anonymous content is not exposed at a standard layer in the 
> way a
> pre-parser transformation does...but that will be longer debate so 
> let's save
> that one for later discussion...  Let us first focus on areas where we 
> agree!!
>

Actually it is.  You can get to the original anonymous content template 
from your source document, and you can also walk the "decorated" DOM 
after XBL has finished with it should you so desire.  Moreover, you can 
mutate the original template using standard DOM operations, and any 
subsequent elements that use that binding will pick up the mutations.

> If you truely want me to go into lots of detail, then I need to first 
> see that
> we truely have an attitude of wanting to do productive work here in 
> this
> thread.  So far, I see that from you.
>
> I would like to go further in areas we agree first, before diving deep 
> into
> areas we disagree.
>

Sure.

>> So my (possibly naive) question is this: what is so horrible about a
>> world in which CSS has that kind of power?
>
> Okay that is good question to explore.  I always wanted to get to that 
> point.
> But first we need to make sure we have the enough agreed foundation on 
> what is
> fundamentally agreed and not agreed.  I am not going to jump n detail 
> (as I did
> with Ian), and then have the foundation of debate constantly shifting.
>
>

Let's explore it.  It seems to me there are two fundamental questions 
being raised here (aside from the argument over semantics).

(1) Is attaching XBL through CSS wrong?
(2) Is XBL redundant with other W3C technologies?

I think (2) is an extremely important question (even more important 
than (1)), because I firmly believe XBL is capable of doing many things 
that cannot be accomplished using only current W3C technologies like 
XSLT.  However, I freely admit that my knowledge of XSLT is rather 
limited.

dave
(hyatt@apple.com)

Received on Sunday, 5 January 2003 13:12:59 UTC