On Thu, Nov 14, 2013 at 3:32 PM, Lance Carlson <lancecarl...@gmail.com> wrote: > The web is HTML. Let's embrace that fact and make > shows/lists as powerful as they can be. Let's hype them up and recode the > coolest blog/forum/HNclones using that platform and have conferences and > tell show everyone how cool we are for using the latest technology. THIS is > how innovation happens.
The web is made of user agents. These are sometimes browsers, sometimes other things. I think treating these other pieces of the web as peers rather than dumb clients is a key trade that CouchDB has actively made [0]. I'm not necessarily against more capabilities for show or list but as they stand today, they seem oddly limited in ways that might be hard to expand to general applications. It's a lot easier to treat the browser as an application platform rather than attempt to get show and list features to fill that role. Outside of the browser case, the need to present data with specific structure, filtering, and context is a real feature. Usually I manage to produce views if I need specific processing to be done. From my point of view the current show/list implementation fits this case poorly. I'd prefer to talk about the problem being solved rather than starting with a solution and finding a problem to keep it around. There might be a great way to get show and list to fit these needs or there might be an entirely new API. One example where we don't have good solutions and force the client to do lifting is conflict handling. A show implementation that could do merges on read could be very useful IMO. Brian. [0]: Benoit's work on event source support is a great example of making it easier for browser based clients to interact more seamlessly with CouchDB. CORS is another area where CouchDB is pushing away the need for middle tiers. I don't see show and list as a good way to remove rendering as a tier. Browser-side rendering seems superior in every way except SEO.
