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

[Peter-Paul Koch]

>I see a middle-ground here. The designers break their page up into "chunks"
>such as masthead, toolbar, content, pull-quotes, footer, secondary
>navigation, etc. Then they let users drag them around and change the colors
>as desired. Designers could create pre-made themes the user could then
>modify (I like this theme but want a different color heading, etc) and even
>offer pre-made "grids" the users could use to drag their content around
>inside to provide a framework within which the user could work (giving the
>users confidence) while still maintaining some usability control (giving
>the designers confidence).

All true, but using the W3C DOM goes beyond changing the design of the site.
In your example, the user might also decide he wants two toolbars and the
script will copy the toolbar for him. Or he might want to split the toolbar.
Theroretically all this should be possible.

>If you think about the concept of the Semantic Web
>(http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/) and computers having the ability to
>understand the data they were looking at - as opposed to the fairly
>crude keyword searching we have now - in conjunction with XFML
>(http://www.xfml.org) and other meta-data resources.

My proposal is not quite the same. It's not about the data itself but about
the presentation of the data.

>"I'd like to know all there is to know about fly fishing for beginners,
>place the content in window three, and bring up the current grocery
>prices in window four. Keep window five on top though, I haven't
>finished reading Madhu's latest recipe yet. actually, while your at it,
>can you grab the list of ingredients and cross reference it with window
>four"

That's searching for the data. The W3C DOM would help you getting the
windows in place, deciding how large they are, adding a new one etc.

We can start experimenting with the W3C DOM right now, but we can't yet
search for data in this way.

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ppk, freelance web developer
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