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Posted by mbstevens on 03/14/06 19:30
Next wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
> Years ago, it occurred to me that a lot of the trouble
> of writing web browsers is caused by the upside-down
> arrangement of things: Javascript code exists inside
> a document, when really it should be the other way around.
There is, in fact, server side javascript. I don't see it
very often -- doesn't seem to have caught on. But from what
you've said this may or may not be what you're really looking
for.
> And yet, although this seems fairly obvious to me,
> having tried myself to write a web browser and given up,
> I don't see a lot of movement by major web browser
> projects in a direction that might TRULY fix the problem.
> I do see a few slow-moving projects: HTML5 and Web Applications.
>
> These are not hobby projects however, and it does seem
> that "industry" always has and always will have a
> preference for messy, bloated applications and poorly
> conceived standards because these things keep people
> buying new computers and justify companies' existences.
> We as consumers and/or hobbyists however should seek
> a better solution, and create it ourselves if necessary!
I can assume, then, that you've left the world of Windows/Mac
behind and have embraced free operating systems?
>
> I would suggest to fix the original problem. Here is my GUIML idea:
> GUIML would encode essentially the basic features of a
> modern GUI widget system, with enhancements to support
> fancier features like animated sprites that you see in some web pages.
> But basically it would reverse the fundamental problem with browsers,
> namely bad design caused by the code-in-document flaw
> that has led to enormous bloat and which has effectively
> made many perfectly usable computers obsolete,
> because web browsing is a vital app.
There is already flash, but it's hard to get standardization on
something like that if you want to support all kinds of
clients on all kinds of machines. Right now there are ways to
use flash and SVG and such in a way that degrades gracefully.
>
> I would welcome any support or criticism of this
> idea but first take a look below at a sample GUIML web design.
> My initial idea is to simply take a familiar GUI like Motif or Java's
> GUI
> and use that as inspiration.
>
> And, to set things right I would completely remove from HTML
> any ability to run Javascript. HTML itself need not even be
> supported but could be replaced with any number of
> document formats such as RTF or something SGML based.
>
> Imagine the following webpage:
>
> <GUIML>
> <head>
> <title> Test </title>
> </head>
> <code>
> <!-- insert here javascript code for initialization, callbacks etc
> -->
> </code>
> <design>
> <MainWindow> <!-- widget that takes a menu, frame, and scrollbar(s)
> -->
> <PulldownMenu location=top preferredPointer="hand">
> <Menu title=About code="javascript_about()">
> </Menu>
> <Menu title=Products>
> <MenuItem code="javascript_callback1()"> First
> </MenuItem>
> </Menu>
> </PulldownMenu>
> <Frame name=main >
UGH! Please don't make the new system require frames.
> <Table width=100% height=100% rows=1 columns=3>
> <tr>
> <td><PushButton code="js_button_callback()" /> </td>
> <td><Image code="js_img_callback()" /> </td>
> <td><Document url="foo.html" /> </td>
> </tr>
> </Table>
> </Frame>
> <ScrollBar location=right type=vertical callback="js_callback2()" />
> </MainWindow>
> </design>
> </GUIML>
>
> Comments?
> z808x@yahoo.com
>
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