LShift Ltd.

Coming to an Interweb near you

Schmoogle, the search engine for finding industry events.

Really, this is imminent, if not already extant …

1 comment September 1st, 2006 mikeb

Small and healthily skeptical is good

Tim Malbon says he’s pleased to be involved in this Web thing, but appears to conflate lack of full assimilation with brain-washing.

One can be a tiny bundle of techno-lust and not believe that successive versions of the Web will lead directly to a shiny new future.

Posting photos to Flickr (Web2.0) seems like something of a tenuous, circuitious route to finding housing for homeless children (shiny future). On the other hand, if you followed that link you’re contributing to something like a counter-argument.

It’s not that I begrudge boosterism, because some interesting things come about that way. I just find the juxtaposition of They see [the Web] as ‘work’ rather than the defining social revolution du jour with They have the air of people who belong to a mind control cult as, well, exquisite.

Having said all that: I quite agree with Tim’s sentiments that Small is Good, creating neat technology isn’t work, and I’d rather be passionate about what I do than uninterested (happily, I am the former).

3 comments August 25th, 2006 mikeb

E4X and the DOM

Reading through tonyg’s recent post I came across something i haven’t yet seen in use - inline XML within Javascript code. E4X, it seems, has landed. It is now available by default in Firefox and Rhino - other implementation will surely follow.

E4X, shorthand for ECMAScript for XML is a nice language extension to Javascript adding native XML support. It adds XML types, a notation for literal XML and some basic operations. Previously, if you wanted to use XML in your Javascript code, you had two choices. Since XML has a textual representation, you could work with strings. This approach, however, is extremely error-prone, and is of limited use if you intend to do anything more sophisticted than just generating XML. The other approach is to use the XML DOM, which exposes the full power of XML using a consistent model, but is too verbose and so rather unpleasant to use.

Example: XML using strings / innerHTML

// Short, but notice how I forgot to close the paragraph
// Also, this is non-standard, and only works in HTML
myElement.innerHTML = '<p><b>Hello</b> <i>World</i>';

Example: XML using the DOM

// That must be one of the longest hello world
// examples I've ever written
var paragraph = document.createElement('p');
var bold = document.createElement('b');
var hello = document.createTextNode('Hello');
bold.appendChild(hello);
var italic = document.createElement('i');
var world = document.createTextNode('World');
italic.appendChild(world);
var space = document.createTextNode(' ');
paragraph.appendChild(bold);
paragraph.appendChild(space);
paragraph.appendChild(world);
myElement.appendhChild(paragraph);

As it happens, I am working on something that requires quite a lot of DOM manipulation within the browser, and tired of constructing XML using the DOM API I set to give the new E4X capabilities of Firefox 1.5 a try. The dissapointing reality, I soon found out, is that while E4X is very much present, it can’t be used for accessing or creating DOM elements. So if you plan on parsing some XML data, or generating XML from your program you can use E4X, but DOM manipulation, arguably the most important activity involving XML in a browser is not served by this new extension at all.

Example: How E4X could be used with the DOM

// This is structured XML, notice how there are no quotes
var p_xml =  <p><b>Hello</b> <i>World</i><p>;
// But unfortunately you can't do that
var p_element = document.createElement(p_xml);
myElement.appendChild(p_element)

Javascript is a complete, general-purpose language, but in practice, it is being used exclusively as an extension for host environments. In Firefox, for example, it is used for adding program logic to the browser’s display formats - HTML, XUL and SVG. These formats can be expressed in text, but in order to manipulate them you need to access them using the DOM. For HTML, firefox adopted the nasty innerHTML non-standard extension, which allows the user to access the contents of a node as text. Fortunately, this extension doesn’t work with non-HTML elements. E4X could have been the perfect replacement - a compromise between using the dumb textual representation and the structured, but counter-intuitive DOM.

Why doesn’t Firefox provide a way to construct and manipulate DOM elements using E4X? It’s hard to blame the mozilla developers, given that the ECMA standard does not include any mention of the DOM or how to interact with it. Any extension they would have come up with would end being the next generation innerHTML non-standard.

This failure of the E4X standard, together with tonyg’s previous critique of E4X, as well as other rumours from the Javascript development arena have me wondering whether the standartisation efforts by ECMA have greatly benefited the language and its active community.

1 comment July 24th, 2006 Tom Berger