[whatwg] XML data islands related question

[Jukka K. Korpela]

2013-08-06 2:27, Ian Hickson wrote:

> On Thu, 7 Feb 2013, Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
[...]
>> It's a bit odd that if you wish to set up a standalone application
>> running in a browser (often called "HTML5 application", without implying
>> any particular version of HTML5), you can include e.g. scripts and
>> images in separate files but not plain text or XML data
>
> Why can't you put plain text or XML data in other files? So long as
> everything is same origin, you can read anything you want via XHR.

A standalone application should be as self-contained as possible, 
without needing HTTP connections or any network connections to access 
its own data. When no connections are needed for other reasons, an HTML5 
application should run in any client capable of just interpreting HTML 
and JavaScript (and, in practice, CSS).

If such an application needs some bulk of text data, it can be included 
e.g. in <script type=text/plain>...</script> but not in a separate plain 
text file (included into the application distribution, along with other 
files) referred to via <script src=...></script>. This is a frustrating 
restriction and makes it more difficult to maintain and customize 
application. If an external plain text file could be used, the data 
content could be separately managed (requiring knowledge only about the 
format used).

Yucca