[whatwg] <a onlyreplace>

[Daniel Glazman]

Hi there,

That onlyreplace attribute is not enough, and trust me, I have
spent quite a while on solutions transforming HTML documents using
bits contained in external instances...

Hixie referenced at some point in the thread my HTMLOverlays proposal
[1] and that proposal has a clear plus compared to the onlyreplace
attribute: it's not meant to ONLY replace but ALSO to add elements to
an existing container, using an order defined by the web author and not
only appending overlaid elements.
That's a _major_ win compared to onlyreplace.

I am not saying here that onlyreplace is a bad idea, it's even a very
good one. And I find VERY amusing to read super-positive comments about
it that are exactly contrary to comments I received myself on
HTMLOverlays while the two proposals are rather similar :-)

That said, there are a few problems to solve:

- what means exactly "replacement" here? What's the scope of a
   <script> element?
- what does it mean for stylesheets and scoped stylesheets?
- what does it mean for the root of the replaced subtree? Let's call
   that the bound element and the binding : how are deferred to the
   subtree even handlers attached to the bound element?
- I don't like <a onlyreplace> because that works only with elements
   inside the body of a document. I want a generic mechanism that can
   apply to elements in head too...
- I think a mechanism using a <link> element is better because it's
   similar to prefetching. It's also semantically better because it
   used a _very_ old proposal of mine called "link dereferencing" [1].
   And of course it is better because it can help resolving the
   progressive rendering issues of <a onlyreplace> since the head
   is parsed before the body...

[1] http://disruptive-innovations.com/zoo/20040830/HTMLoverlays.html
[2] http://www.w3.org/Submission/1997/12/

</Daniel>