[whatwg] about rich internat applications

[Didier PH Martin]

Hi Dean,


> there are some implementation issues with dhtml behaviors.
> particularly:
> 
> * path problems
> URLs of behaviors are *always* relative to the containing (x)html page
> not the CSS file. very annoying.

I agree, this is contrary to good code re-use and management practice 

> * caching
> not sure how explorer caches behaviors. but i'm sure it's not pretty.

It's cached like all the other web documents. Not more, not less.

> 
> * memory leaks
> i've been assured that behaviors leak memory. apparently *all* explorer
> apps leak memory (due to poor js model)

true, we made test on mozilla and IE and found a lot more memory leaks on IE
than on mozilla 1.6.

> 
> * crashes
> yep. behaviors crash the browser like nothing else. this is most common
> in testing phases (see caching above). from what i know this affects
> particular builds of explorer more than others.

Very dependent on the version and the build. Better on IE 6 SP1.


To bring more precision, I didn't mentioned behaviors as a mention of
support to Microsoft but as an interesting mechanism for rich internet
application. In particular, behaviors allow having more than one element to
inherit an identical behavior. For instance, to transform two table elements
in a document into sort-able table. As another advantage, to be able to
declare the behavior in an external document makes it easier to decouple the
behavior from the document. Hence to change the behavior without changing
the document structure (add, modify or suppress a behavior associated to an
element). 

Cheers
Didier PH Martin