On Tue, 11 Dec 2001, Jon Wall wrote:
> Date: Tue, 11 Dec 2001 07:24:58 -0800 (PST)
> From: Jon Wall <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Reply-To: Struts Developers List <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> To: Struts Developers List <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Subject: Re: Freetext attribute for all tags...
>
> Amen Arron.
>
> It seems like the top priority of web development and
> this list in particular has become complying with
> standards. While I agree that is important and we've
> shot ourselves in the foot before, I think we're
> forgetting that the absolute number one priority in
> any UI development should be to make the user's life
> easier.
>
As nice as this goal sounds, it is not sufficient to describe why I
created Struts in the first place. My top-level goal with regards to
usability is "make it easier for the user to do the right thing instead of
the wrong thing."
Why did MVC used to be hard? Because you had to do it all yourself, so
even people who understood the benefits were dissuaded by the amount of
work. Presto -- a controller servlet and configuration mechanism makes it
easier enough for people to be willing to invest the effort, and therefore
benefit from the result. They had to work harder in the beginning (to
understand the framework, and build all the pieces, but in the long run it
really is easier on them.
Does that stop people from writing Model-1-type code? Of course not --
you're perfectly free to do that to yourself. But Struts won't help you
in that direction.
This is why the HTML tag library in Struts has always stuck with the W3C
definitions for which elements it supports. You can continue to support
old browsers by workarounds (like the explicit <textarea> tag quoted
earlier in this thread). Just don't expect the framework to encourage
this.
In an increasingly XML-based world, developers are going to learn that
there are more benefits than penalties to sticking with standards (not the
least of which is that XML parsers will through away your web services
transactions if they don't conform to the corresponding DTD or schema :-).
The browser legacy issues, of course, continue to exist due to the really
lousy way that Netscape and Microsoft evolved the HTML implementations in
their browsers. They chose to avoid standardization -- tell me, do *you*
think that the need for browser-detection scripts to deal with all the
differences makes life *easier* for developers??? But that doesn't mean
that Struts needs to encourage a continuation of that by enabling the
continued use of non-standard browser features directly. Put that kind of
stuff in the template text where it belongs.
Craig McClanahan
--
To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
