On unobtrusive javascript

This is a short rant that was originally part of my HTML forms write-up, but that I took out, because it became too long.

I haven't been writing unobtrusive javascript for at least a decade, and perhaps that was a mistake, but it was also inevitable. In my own defense: it seems HTML is actually quite incoherent... Yup, I just wrote that. I mean, you have tags that denote text levels, similar to those used in text processing software, like paragraph, header, blockquote and (later on) the HTML5 semantic tag set. You also have tags that denote some concrete representational blocks that can be considered part of the document flow, like img and table, or more generic tags that can be used to manipulate document flow, like div or span. The hyperlink is the VIP of the web, and a different beast altogether. Then there's the form, with its controls, which isn't representational at all, but primarily functional.

I think the distinction between representational and functional elements in HTML has been underestimated, and led to the explosion of (very obtrusive) javascript libraries to create class-based widgets. At least they were generic enough, and controllable through a well-described API. The standard that eventually evolved from this, namely web components, is no different. Although it may fill the gap between built-in markup and custom, javascript-enriched bundles of functionality, it's still mainly this functionality we're after, not text layout. Calling a class-based object an HTML element doesn't really change anything.

Finally, there's the argument that we should use meaningful (or semantic) tags. But there's nothing semantic about HTML itself. The semantic tag set that was added to HTML5 denotes text layout, which may be meaningful to browsers and text processing software, but not necessarily to humans. We should take people with disabilities into account when writing web applications, and for that it's helpful to specify the parts of document flow. But it's a formality that can also be controlled through application code. In the worst case, thinking semantically the HTML5 way impairs programmatic control and generics, simply making it harder to automate the process of creating web applications.

Ironically, semantic tagging is no longer the domain of markup, and moves in the direction of data. Yes, we're back where we started: markup and data are again separated. JSON-LD is an initiative that's quite new, but it enables consumers of public web API's to retrieve information in an automated fashion. This means we only have to decide what to automate: or we write programs that generate separate representations for humans and machines, or we write programs that generate a mix of meaning and functionality in HTML, sprinkled with some unobtrusive javascript.

So I'm like, yeah, whatever man, whatever.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Abandoning hope... and XForms

Sometimes a decision must be made. I have invested many hours in a standard that is quite complex and tedious to maintain, and that was great fun, but enough is enough. Why did I invest in XForms when it took so much effort and time? Because I believe standards are good and good standards come from the W3C and the XML community. Also, I always had somewhat of an inferiority complex in IT development that I tried to compensate by using techniques supposedly invented for common folk, i.e. non-programmers. Both are bad reasons from where I now stand. I took up XForms because I was infected by the enthusiasm of a friend (who was even quicker to abandon it) about 3 years ago. At first I assumed it just used a model from which to infer a form. It turned out it was like a superset of HTML forms with options for displaying and validating data. This was largely taken up by HTML5, as we all know. The Model remains the core of XForms, but the W3C is slow to respond to innovations and t...
Read more

JS Journey into outer space - Day 5

This article was written as part of a knowledge sharing program I created for front-end developers. It builds up to creating reusable abstractions by studying async transducers. Day 5 It's time to add more operators. We already have map , but what if the mapping function returns another "container" value, like an array or observable? 🦉 In RxJS some operators like switchMap , concatMap , or mergeMap will expect a "project" function that returns an observable (or promise or array), but what happens then? First map is applied with the project function and after that the result is "flattened". In other words: when the returned (inner) observables emit, the mapped (outer) observable emits those values instead. Since RxJs streams have a specific async behaviour the flattening process takes concurrency into account: mergeMap will flatten inner observables whenever they complete, regardless of the order, but concatMap will preserve the order of the ou...
Read more

JS Journey into outer space - Day 4

This article was written as part of a knowledge sharing program I created for front-end developers. It builds up to creating reusable abstractions by studying async transducers. Day 4 Now we have modified transduce to handle async it's time to figure out how it can handle observables. Kickoff 🏈 First we need to pass the onNext function which kicks off the callback chain. In RxJs this is called subscribe instead, so let's rename the parameter and the callbacks to be more in line with RxJs : function transduce ( input , fn , subscribe , onError , onComplete , init ) { subscribe ( input , { next : ( cur ) => { init = fn ( init , cur ) ; } , error : ( err ) => { onError ( init , err ) ; } , complete : ( ) => { onComplete ( init ) ; } } ) ; return init ; } ; 🦉 Observables are considered a push-style of dealing with many values, while generators are pull-based. In...
Read more