[whatwg] Seperation of Content and Interface

[Jim Ley]

On Sun, 11 Jul 2004 15:31:14 -0400 (EDT), Joshua Wise
<joshua at joshuawise.com> wrote:
>        -> Hypertext interfaces need to be seperated into two markup
> languages - one for content, and one for layout.

This has already been done, indeed most of the standards are already
finished, or getting close.  (XForms, SVG (with sexball) etc.)

However the problem with these is that they don't degrade in HTML, and
we have implementation problems with people very unwilling to change
browsers (sensibly as they generally all work).

The obvious solution to me is plugins, they're much easier for people
to install.  Here Mozilla/Opera/Safari are ensuring this is simple, by
standardising a good new plug-in architecture:

<URL: http://www.mozilla.org/press/mozilla-2004-06-30.html >
 
However as well as that there's the WHAT-WG effort, which I'm not
wholly sure what problems it's trying to solve other than a tiny
incremental increase in what can be done with just HTML based
solutions.  I don't really think that's particularly worthwhile,
but...

Jim.