Scripting and XML

[Simon St.Laurent]

I suspect this thread has been beaten into the dirt.

(Comments addressed to Paul Prescod)

You and several other participants in this discussion seem to have some 
convictions that I'm not likely to change. The emphasis is constantly on the 
need for separating document content from all other participants in the 
presentation and/or content of a document, whether they be formatting or 
scripting.  While this may be admirable philosophically, in practice I suspect 
it's going to make many tasks more complex, even in the long term.

Your interpretation of scriptlets is extremely limited. Microsoft has indeed 
presented quick hacks to demonstrate their tools, not rich documents, but this 
hardly means that scriptlets are intended purely for scripting.  They do 
provide a better set of tools for componentizing scripts, but that's only half 
the issue - at least if you believe their press releases.

Keeping markup as markup and script as script may seem attractive, but it 
often does a very poor job when in situations that call for activity on the 
user's desktop.  This can be as simple as expanding and collapsing outlines or 
as complex as providing rich GUI interfaces in the browser environment.  
Whether or not the XML community wants to do perform these tasks, XML offers 
HTML developers a much better toolset for performing them and will undoubtedly 
be applied to them.

Again, we'll see what happens in reality, when all the bozos get their hands 
on this.

Simon St.Laurent
Dynamic HTML: A Primer


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