[whatwg] XML data islands related question

Neerja Anand neerja at kynex.com
Thu Feb 7 14:17:18 PST 2013


Hello Mat - well this feature is already developed by Microsoft, it is just
discontinued now in the newer browsers. It won't really be a point to
reinvent the wheel if the work has already been done to include data island,
and then bind that data to the fields on the page. If you could get that
code from Microsoft and include that as your standard, then other browsers
would have to incorporate it. So our hope is that you would be able to get
in touch with Microsoft to get this functionality and update your standards.

 

Please let us know if that is doable. Alternatively if you have Microsoft's
contact information then I could reach out to them to request handing over
that code to you.

 

Please advise on how to proceed.

 

Thanks very much.

 

Neerja

 

  _____  

From: Mat Carey [mailto:mat at matcarey.co.uk] 
Sent: Thursday, February 07, 2013 9:59 AM
To: Neerja Anand
Cc: whatwg at lists.whatwg.org
Subject: Re: [whatwg] XML data islands related question

 

I've been thinking about this too...

 

> We wanted to request they could be supported as an addon/plugin into the
browser if not incorporated into the browser by default

 

I came to the conclusion that if I care enough I should write a browser
plugin having reverse engineered the data island spec which would allow
people with my plugin to use these sites, then bring this to WHATWG to
suggest wider adoption.

 

I'm not particularly active on WHATWG but the general approach seems to be
that if you have a good idea you should go and create it, show that it works
and then bring it to WHATWG for a wider adoption.

 

My advice would be to have a look and see if anyone's already started a
project to reverse engineer this, if they have join it, if they haven't
start it.

 

I decided previously that I don't care enough to do this work myself, if
there's someone else working towards this I might be willing to help in an
open source project and I'm sure there's others who would do the same.

 

I could be wrong - if I am I'm sure someone will correct me.

 

Mat Carey

 

On Thu, Feb 7, 2013 at 2:47 PM, Neerja Anand <neerja at kynex.com> wrote:

Hello - it appears that XML data islands (originally created by Microsoft)
have been discontinued in the newer browsers. We wanted to request they
could be supported as an addon/plugin into the browser if not incorporated
into the browser by default. We understand that this was a Microsoft only
feature but they are extremely helpful to our business and their
discontinuation would highly affect our business. Our request is to make
them as an HTML5 standard, so all browsers would then have to support this
feature. This would make the life of us developers much easier. We are not
asking for Microsoft's version of XML data islands specifically, but would
want this feature as a standard in some version. We noticed there is
something new called Data Block which may be similar to XML data islands,
but couldn't find much information on it to proceed. If you know of Data
Blocks being an alternative to XML data islands, then if you could provide
some documentation or point us to the location where we can get more
information (with examples on how to use them) that would be very helpful as
well.



Any feedback on this would be appreciated.



Thanks very much in advance!



Neerja Anand

neerja at kynex.com








 

-- 

Web Developer & Consultant 

 <mailto:mat at matcarey.co.uk> mat at matcarey.co.uk
 <http://www.matcarey.co.uk/> www.matcarey.co.uk 

07952258096 




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