[thelist] What shall we do with the W3C DOM?

[Peter-Paul Koch]

>If you want an example of a baby step of what PPK's talking about, dig
>into iht.com.  Between the pagination and the "clippings" functionality
>(which has been since duplicated on a couple of other sites, I've noticed)
>iht.com might be considered a proof-of-concept.

Yes, I think so too. I'm not sure if your preferences for font size are
stored. In my idea it definitely should be.

>In terms of consequences... someobody's gonna have to fight the
>resistance, sooner or later.  In any event, I agree with the poster who
>said earlier that there would be resistance to the concept from all
>sides... clients won't like the loss of control, users won't grasp what
>can be done, and so on...

Hazards of the trade. People were frightened of websites, too, long ago...

>What I see as a problem with the mating of DOM to the task of customizing
>layout is not so much user or client resistance, but the flaws in existing
>paradigms, which users would be forced to deal with yet once again... ;-)

What do you mean? Browser incompatibilities? Or wrong decisions by the
development team? Ideally and theoretically, wrong decisions by the
development team would be solved by the users themselves when they create
their own interface.

>suppose i move stuff around to my liking, like the nav bar on the right
> >and suppressing any divs that have ads in them, and then click on a >link
>to go see something else...
>
>... what happens when i click back?  do i have to re-personalize?

Cookie. Your preferences must definitely be stored.

>The reports I develop sit on a production server. Users access
>the reports using IE ... along with a small browser plug-in.
>
>Once they have the report open, users can re-arrange the order
>of the columns of data, change the sort, add filters, add totals,
>hide some columns of data, unhide columns of data that I've hidden,
>add new sections of data [1], or add bar or pie charts.

Yes, that's the general idea. I hope to go one step further than these
applications, though (but where to? or how?)

>Granted - products like this only work in a 'report' setting and
>aren't providing WYSIWYG capabilities for the overall design - or
>all elements, but I think this may give you some ideas for practical
>application on an Intranet.

Certainly. Now we have to find out whether the W3C DOM can, in some
situations, be better than such an application.

In any case I gather that there hasn't been written (or thought?) much about
this subject yet.


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ppk, freelance web developer
Interaction, copywriting, JavaScript, integration
http://www.xs4all.nl/~ppk/
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