[dojo-contributors] Re: Figuring out what Dojo needs to become. A few questions.

[Alex Russell]

On Friday 22 December 2006 8:13 am, Eugene Lazutkin wrote:
> I agree basically with everything in your laundry list but I am
> curious to hear some explanations/rationale behind items. Inline.
>
> Alex Russell wrote:
> > * simplify the widget construction syntax
> >   - remove the <dojo:whatever ...> style in HTML environments
>
> Why?

It's confusing and not generally useful.

> >   - remove the <div dojoType="..."> style in HTML environments
>
> Why?

It's a major marketing "ding" against us. As much as I hate to say it, 
we lose a lot of respect because of our pragmatism and it's backed us 
into a pretty low-performance decisions. If we side-step them entirely 
(behavior hacks + XSLT), we can get better performance and put to death 
some of the nay-saying, all with one stone. Seems like a no-brainer.

> >   - enhance the <div class="dojo-Whatever"> style to support
> > parameter passing based on node ID and/or type
>
> How do you plan to enhance it?

With a syntax similar to what we've prototyped in the dojo.behavior 
module. Here's a straw-man API for registering a set of default 
properties of a widget type on a given page, based on the behavior API:

	// not sure if this should live under dojo.widget.*
	dojo.widget.add({
		"dojo:ComboBox": {
			width: "30px",
			complexProperty: {
				thinger: "value",
				blah: "value2"
			}
		},

		// individual widget configuration based on node ID
		"#id4": {
			dojoType: "dojo:ComboBox",
			// widget properties here
			...
		},

		...
	});

Of course, we still need inline configuration. Here's how:

	<div class="dojo-ComboBox"
		style="border:1px solid black; dojo-PropertyName: value; 
dojo-PropertyName2: value2; ...">
		...
	</div>

In this case, we would obey a cascade much the way CSS behaves today and 
if users specify all of their properties in the parser-advice block, we 
can avoid string casting and significant amounts of iteration.

Obviously, this syntax is HTML-specific, but as we've been finding out, 
being "agnostic" about rendering environment has real costs and parts 
of the world we planed for once-upon-a-time never materialized. Other 
parts did. Time to do minor course corrections to meet reality where it 
is.

Regards

-- 
Alex Russell
alex at sitepen.com     A99F 8785 F491 D5FD 04D7 ACD9 4158 FFDF 2894 6876
alex at dojotoolkit.org BE03 E88D EABB 2116 CC49 8259 CF78 E242 59C3 9723
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