On Thursday 26 July 2007, Man-wai Chang wrote: > Out of curiosity, is there any effort in creating a new DOM that's > easier for application builders (something like Visual Foxpro)? > > Does Web 2.0 or maybe 3.0 offer some new <input> types, say something > like a real grid, or maybe a modal child popup?
You're confusing two different things. The DOM is a standard API developed by the W3C for addressing tree data structures, generally XML or a data structure that maps to XML. It is language-independent, which is why the Javascript DOM functions look and act really really closely to the PHP DOM functions. Do not expect the DOM API to change any time soon. XHTML is a particular XML DocType. One can manipulate it using the DOM API. That is very frequently done using Javascript, but in PHP 5 can be done in PHP as well with essentially the same API. The DOM functions can be a bit clunky, though, so various Javascript libraries exist that wrap them up into some easier syntax. My preference is for jQuery, but there are many others. Web 2.0 is a marketing term for a technical style and visual design movement. It was invented by Tim O'Reilly as a somewhat joke, and picked up by people with too much time and not enough brains to mean "Dot Boom 2.0". Web 3.0 is a fictional term that is used only to make fun of people who use the term Web 2.0 with a straight face. What you're actually asking for is new elements in the DocType that offer richer form elements. Do not expect that any time soon on a massive scale. HTML/XHTML is unlikely to get such a thing any time soon. There is the XForms standard from W3C, but I don't know of anything that actually uses it. Microsoft would say "just use .NET", but that just gets boiled down to some variant of Javascript that runs only in every bug-fix release of IE. Probably the only useful "richer forms" system right now with any mass-market adoption is XUL, which is the XML-based interface language used by Gecko, the Firefox engine. It runs in pretty much any version of Firefox, but is a very different animal from HTML. http://www.xulplanet.com/ -- Larry Garfield AIM: LOLG42 [EMAIL PROTECTED] ICQ: 6817012 "If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it." -- Thomas Jefferson -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
