[whatwg] Seperation of Content and Interface

[Jim Ley]

On Sun, 11 Jul 2004 16:22:55 -0400, Joshua Wise <joshua at joshuawise.com> wrote:
> I googled for sexball and got lots of porn, and I googled
> for SVG sexball and got just IRC logs. Can someone enlighten me?) 

Sorry, sXBL - SVG binding of XBL, it's not officially public yet, but
RCC from the previous SVG drafts are pretty much the same thing but
with different names.  As is XBL from mozilla etc.
 
> Instead, they can create
> a simple .layout file and a simple .content file, and have something else
> reference those.

Well HTML and CSS can already do this to a certain extent.  however
sXBL etc. technologies will enable you to style your Atom feed itself
directly into whatever rendering you like.  So instead of just using
HTML for content, you get any XML format that exists for the
semantics.  Be it XHTML 2.0 or whatever.

> Okay, that makes sense. However, I see no reason why one could not create a
> plugin that would in turn create a nice HTML DOM tree to handle it. For those
> who have no option like that (Internet Explorer?),

You could, but HTML+CSS is not a particularly good rendering language
in current implementations, once the DOM gets big, it all becomes very
slow, they're not really optimised for this.

> conceivably one could also
> write a "proxy" that allowed it to downgrade into html.

Sure you could, but there's no point building another layer into your
application, unless there are very powerful arguments for it - if
you're building websites, then you might as well use it directly (this
is a problem with Web Forms 2 aswell with the javascript shim
approach)

> My main
> goals with this are to keep it extensible, portable, simple, and
> future-proof. A daunting task, but I think the result would be well worth it.

No, we've got these technologies already, well known XML format for
content (whatever is appropriate) then XBL/XSLT/CSS into a rendering
language be it SVG/XHTML+CSS/or something else.   Nothing new to
standardise, just find a way to implement it.

At least I think they do.

Jim.