DOM

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?

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> 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?

Java is just a specialized DOM... in my opinion.

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Man-wai Chang wrote:
>> 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?
>
> Java is just a specialized DOM... in my opinion.
>
Where did you get this weird idea... JAVA by itself has nothing to do
with the web or documents... It's commonly used to perform such tasks,
but it's not the "purpose" of the language. You could as well say that
PHP is just a specialized email-form language, which would also be not
quite right.

On Jul 26, 8:39 am, toylet.toy...@gmail.com (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?
>
> --

I don't know about you, but I'm on Web 2.5 and I'm loving it!

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/

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On Thursday 26 July 2007, Man-wai Chang wrote:
> > 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?
>
> Java is just a specialized DOM... in my opinion.

Java has absolutely nothing to do with the subject at hand. Java is a
compiled bytecode language. DOM is a language-agnostic API for managing
tree-based data structure.

I suspect you're referring to Javascript, which has even less to do with Java
than PHP does.

Javascript is also not a specialized language-agnostic API. Javascript is a
fully capable and quite powerful semi-functional language in its own right
(semi-functional meaning you can do functional programming in it, not that it
only sort-of works <g>). It is very frequently used for manipulating the DOM
of an HTML page in a browser, but that is by no means its only ability any
more than PHP is just a specialized HTML.

--
Larry Garfield AIM: LOLG42
larry@garfieldtech.com 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

On Thu, July 26, 2007 7:39 am, Man-wai Chang wrote:
> 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?

No, that would be a useful feature, and browser-makers have much more
important (read: inane) features to implement.

:-)

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Thanks to all.

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[snip]
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?
[/snip]

[potential holy war bits]
There is no such thing as Web 2.0 much less 3.0. Really. AJAX is a
METHODOLOGY (a quite simple one at that) not a LANGUAGE.
[/potential holy war bits]

Having said that....(and someone else explained DOM earlier)

There have been several very robust and cross-browser (more and better
browser support as well) JavaScript libraries put together lately and
most of these support some sort of AJAX functionality. Some of these may
offer what you are looking for.

Let's examine your "real grid" question for a moment;

A table is a real grid. Not necessarily an interactive grid, but a real
grid none the less. Are you looking for something along the lines of a
tag that would be like this?

<grid cols="24" rows="16" border="1" tabMove="yes"></grid>

In this example I have enabled a 24 column x 16 row grid and hitting the
tab key will move between cells. As far as know nothing exists like this
in the W3 specs for HTML, DHTML, or XHTML now and is not likely to
anytime soon as these are all derivatives of SGML which is a mark-up
language, not a modal language.