On Wed, Aug 29, 2012 at 3:39 AM, Fred Andrews <[email protected]> wrote: > We should also consider new computation approaches for use within web content > that gives the users better control.
I think getting new features along these lines into user agents is more effective than adding informative notes to specs. ;) > Javascript is just too general a programming language for easy management and > is heading in the direction of Java. I'm not sure how far the problem is Javascript, rather than the browser and document object models exposed to JS. HTML does now offer improved sandboxing (see the sandbox attribute on iframe). But see also http://www.adsafe.org/ for some more ideas about sandboxing JS. > For example a lot could be done with data-flow computations. Are you talking about something like the "calculate" property from XForms? http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/REC-xforms-20091020/#model-prop-calculate > This could implement equations for layout, Layout deficiencies are best addressed by adding CSS features, no? >, and simple event processing, that would meet the needs of many websites >without the need to even enable 'Javascript'. Note HTML has introduced a lot of new features that would previously have required JS events: video, audio, new field types, autocompletion, basic clientside validation. (There was an idea knocking around a few months ago to allow users to open <dialog> elements without JS as well as close them, but that's not yet made an appearance in the spec.) > More advanced data-flow blocks could well be managed by the user, much like > apps, and may run managed Javascript. Are you talking about (say) a variation on the <output> element where the interfaces exposed to the JS to do the calculation would be limited? > General Javascript code execution needs to be separated from the web content > - the two have become confused. I think we can certainly add new features to the JS-independent HTML core, but I wouldn't expect the gradual absorption of common imperatively programmed patterns into declarative features to stop lots of sites requiring JS. -- Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
