Scripting and XML

[Simon St.Laurent]

>I expect that a few years from now this convention of putting markup and
>scripting cheek to cheek will have died out. It is just another face of
>the logical markup vs. presentational markup war. The trend is from
>inline to external, just as with presentation.

I agree with you on presentation, but I'll argue quite heartily that scripting 
is becoming an integral part of content.

>The document
>object model finally allows you to refer to document elements from
>*outside* your document so that you have *less need* to directly mix
>scripts and code. Using DOM I can create a client-side program that
>takes an XML instance as input and returns XML as output. I can't do
>that with JavaScript as it exists today. The JavaScript "model" is
>textual replacement (which must, by definition, be "inline"). The DOM
>model is structural processing (which can be done "remotely").

Which _can_ be done remotely - but that isn't to say that remote control is 
always the best solution.  OOP ticked off a lot of people when it first 
appeared for suggesting that data and code might work better as a unit than as 
separate parts, and I suspect JavaScript (though it's hardly OO) is going to 
take knocks for a similar offense.  I'm not completely sure where you're 
coming from declaring the "JavaScript 'model' is textual replacement" - while 
textual replacement is one part of the JavaScript toolset, it's hardly the 
only piece.

As much as I hate to use them as an example, Microsoft's scriptlets are a 
strong step in the opposite direction of what you would like to see.  
Scriptlets combine a small amount of code and some markup to create an 
interface component that can be added easily to a page.  If anything, the 
trend (in my feeble opinion) is toward further mixing of code and markup, not 
less.  Scriptlets can be quick hacks, or they can be elaborate interface 
components.

As I said before, we'll see what people actually do with the stuff soon 
enough.

Simon St.Laurent
Dynamic HTML: A Primer


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