On Sat, 23 Apr 2011 02:35:53 +0200, Rafael Weinstein <rafa...@google.com>
wrote:
Myself and a few other chromium folks have been working on a design
for a formalized separation between View and Model in the browser,
with needs of web applications being the primary motivator.
Our ideas are implemented as an experimental Javascript library:
https://code.google.com/p/mdv/ and the basic design is described here:
http://mdv.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/docs/design_intro.html. It's not
complete and there are things we're not happy with, but it's
self-consistent enough that you can start to imagine what a full
design might look like.
It looks an *awful* lot like the templating part of Web forms. If you get
a copy of Opera 9.5 (we removed the code when it became clear that nobody
else would implement in the last 3 years), you can see that in action with
the attached code:
<div class="entry">
<div id="repeatformcontainer">
<div id="tem1" repeat="template" repeat-min="2" repeat-max="5">
<input type="text" name="product.[tem1]" value="one thing">
<button type=remove>Remove</button>
<button type=move-up>Move Up</button>
<button type=move-down>Move Down</button><br />
</div>
<p><button type=add template=tem1>Add</button>
</div>
</div>
That in turn was a pretty straight rip-off from Xforms which allows the
same thing with a little more power, and is even closer to what it seems
you're looking to do.
We hope to get others interested in collecting requirements/use cases
and fleshing out a good solution.
I used it to create simple tools that created templates, and tools that
used templates for collecting information. My first use case was a
multilingual international court case (i.e. something that really mattered
and not just a test), and the ability to easily generate custom systems
was fantastic.
I greatly appreciated the ability to have models without needing to use
script - as Steven Pemberton says of Xforms, this makes development much
faster by reducing complexity in the code, and my experience conincides
with that perfectly. While I could readily use scripting to develop the
same systems I would expect the work to take longer and be substantially
more complex to maintain and debug.
FWIW as far as you do make something script-based, I agree with the
sentiment expressed that it should work well with existing libraries,
helping them to reduce the towe-of-babel problem by converging rather than
increasing it by adding yet another set of libraries to the mixture.
We're starting the discussion here because a few people in this group
from whom we got early feedback felt that it would be most appropriate
place
It probably makes sense to ask the Forms group as well, given that it
doesn't require much squinting to get to the perspective where you're
pretty much reinventing a wheel they've already got two of.
and, further, that this work bears some relation to XBL.
As well, at least conceptually.
cheers
Chaals
--
Charles McCathieNevile Opera Software, Standards Group
je parle français -- hablo español -- jeg lærer norsk
http://my.opera.com/chaals Try Opera: http://www.opera.com
