the challenges of 'extensible'

["Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>]

I wrote a bit last week about the Extensible Web Summit, and actually 
got to attend that deeply brain-stimulating event.  It was partly an 
exploration of possibilities for the Web and partly an excellent tour of 
the W3C sausage-making conversations.  Every session I attended had 
reminders of challenges we've talked about here.

I've written a general report on it here:

<http://programming.oreilly.com/2014/04/can-we-extend-the-web-cleanly.html>

but there are a few pieces I'd add from a specifically XML perspective.

The difficult problems remain difficult, no matter what the context.  I 
perhaps foolishly chose "Data Binding Interop" for my first session to 
see if anything had changed.  I was rewarded with echoes of 2000, with 
more emphasis on structure and less emphasis on type obsession.  Instead 
of arguments between vendors it was arguments among framework creators. 
 I looked a few times to Jeni Tennison and Norm Walsh for confirmation 
that we'd been here before.

(I may also have even less sympathy for "data binding" than I used to 
because too much time in Erlang makes it hard for me ever to see object 
models as saviors.)

I'd strongly encourage XML folks to explore the HTML Web Components 
conversation.  In some ways, it's the Web community attempting to do for 
itself what the XML community tried to do for them a decade and a half 
ago.  The HTML side has a mostly understood set of tools for specifying 
appearance, accessibility, and behavior.

For a quick intro, I recommend "A Detailed Introduction To Custom Elements":

<http://coding.smashingmagazine.com/2014/03/04/introduction-to-custom-elements/>

The breakdowns tend to come at the intersections of those, which are 
generally in the DOM, which is an object model, so...

Spending time in HTML reminds me rapidly of how lucky XML was to be able 
to develop alternatives to the DOM.  Despite the "it's a standard, thou 
shalt use it" attitude of some, we weren't locked into it the same way 
that HTML folks were.  In particular, we haven't tried to hang 
_everything_ off of it, at least not very often.

There were also some promising conversations about directions that might 
make CSS more flexible and address the packaging problems that never 
seem to depart.  The last session I went to, on editing and 
ContentEditable in particular, was another reminder that difficult 
things are difficult.

Thanks,
Simon St.Laurent
http://simonstl.com