Scripting and XML

Sun Oct 19 20:28:57 BST 1997

At 07:10 AM 10/19/97 -0400, David Megginson graced us with:
> One reason that I've never tried JavaScript (other than the security
> holes) is that -- as far as I can tell -- there's no way to put the
> code in a separate file from the HTML page.  There are enormous
> advantages to maintaining processing code separately from markup:

I know that SGML purists cringe at the sight of this, but Server Side 
Includes are a useful mechanism for many such instances:

<HEAD><TITLE> title </TITLE>
<!--#include virtual="/javascript/myscript.js" -->
</HEAD>

What bothers me, though is that this only covers the function definitions
or onLoad stuff. To associate these functions with the markup means you
have to embed event handlers in the appropriate elements, which sucks.

So, major code reuse akin to headers in C/C++ is possible if ugly. But
minor recycing of code is impossible for now. MSIE4 introduces a new form
of script object handling, "scriptlets", which addresses this problem to
some extent, but any useful script component would need to be extended
to fit any given situation - the same problem which drives OOA&D/OOP -
so it has yet to be seen how useful this scriptlet idea will be.

Steve

--
Steven Champeon                  | It is very dark. You are
http://www.hesketh.com/schampeo/ | likely to be eaten by a grue.
http://www.jaundicedeye.com      |           - Zork

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