"DOM" entries

Stop standardizing HTML

It's time for developers to create their own vocabularies

When HTML first appeared, it offered a coherent if limited vocabulary for sharing content on the newly created World Wide Web. Today, after HTML has handed off most of its actual work to other specifications, it’s time to stop worrying about this central core and let developers choose their own markup vocabularies and processing.

When the W3C first formed, it formed around HTML, the core standard of content on the Web, defining the structure, appearance, and behavior of content. Over the next few years, however, it became clear that HTML was doing too much, and the W3C and other groups refactored appearance, behavior, and many semantics into separate specifications:

  • Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) took responsibility for presentation and layout.

  • JavaScript took responsibility for behavior, aided by the Document Object Model (DOM) and a variety of APIs for handling device and multimedia interactions.

  • WAI-ARIA took responsibility for accessibility semantics, ensuring that content remained available to a broad audience even if developers pushed the current boundaries of markup.

It’s not a completely neat separation – some of CSS feels like behavior, and JavaScript can manipulate presentation, for example, but it certainly took a lot of pieces out of HTML. A few aspects of HTML, notably media inclusion, are still mostly handled at the markup level, but most of them aren’t any longer. Forms and linking are both still defined in HTML itself, but aren’t difficult to implement separately.

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Learning Paths for JavaScript

Cody Lindley on finding your way through a popular and powerful language

Everyone learns and teaches JavaScript their own way, but Cody Lindley (@codylindley) has spent a lot of time with a lot of different kinds of learners. He made the jQuery Cookbook happen, finding and managing contributors as well as making a large contribution himself, and he’s a regular at JavaScript conferences.

O’Reilly recently published his JavaScript Enlightenment and DOM Enlightenment, so it seemed like a good time to talk about how developers find their way through the many choices JavaScript offers.

Highlights include:

  • JavaScript developer? Or front-end engineer? Websites? Or applications? (at 0:52)
  • Don’t be down on jQuery users (at 2:03)
  • JavaScript objects are different, and critical (at 4:07)
  • The varying degrees of genius in JavaScript libraries (at 7:17)
  • Are buffers between your code and browser APIs necessary? (at 9:17)
  • Running browser tests on the DOM (at 11:08)
  • Needing more focused in-depth documentation (at 12:57)

His closing – “we need to do a better job communicating with the bulk of developers out there” – sounded just right to me.

You can view the entire conversation in the following video: