Fwd: XBL2

Since there was a question at SVG Open about what was happening with XBL, this recent message may be of interest.

XBL2 was already a step back compared to sXBL for use with SVG; these  recent unilateral changes appear to make it impossible, rather than merely hard, to use with SVG.


This is a forwarded message
From: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
To: public-webapps@w3.org
Date: Friday, September 3, 2010, 3:23:33 AM
Subject: XBL2

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Since XBL2 wasn't getting much traction, I've taken an axe to the spec and 
made a number of changes to the spec based on some discussions with some 
browser vendors:

   http://dev.w3.org/2006/xbl2/Overview.html

The main changes are simplification: I've dropped namespace support, made 
it part of HTML rather than its own language, dropped <style> and <script> 
in favour of HTML equivalents, dropped all the <handler> syntactic sugar 
(and redirected event forwarding to internal object instead), dropped 
<preload>, dropped mentions of XForms and XML Events, and so on. I've 
updated all the examples to use the new syntax, so if you're curious about 
the differences, comparing the examples in the spec above to those in the 
TR version is probably a good way to get an idea of what I did.

If this ends up being more successful than the previous work on this 
specification, I'll have to merge it with the HTML spec to more properly 
define how it works. Right now it leaves a lot of the detail a bit vague 
(e.g. integration with the event loop, the parser, authoring conformance 
definitions, etc). If this happens, I don't yet know how much this will 
lend itself to being extracted back out into a separate module (for 
publication by this working group), versus being just published as a core 
part of the HTML spec, but I will be happy to update the group on this 
matter as it becomes clearer.

I don't think the draft above would be suitable for publication as a TR/ 
draft, because of the aforementioned rough edges. I mostly just wanted to 
provide this for discussion, to see whether people considered this a move 
in a good direction or a significant step backwards.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

===8<===========End of original message text===========


-- 
 Chris Lilley   Technical Director, Interaction Domain                 
 W3C Graphics Activity Lead, Fonts Activity Lead
 Co-Chair, W3C Hypertext CG
 Member, CSS, WebFonts, SVG Working Groups

Received on Friday, 3 September 2010 06:46:38 UTC