Re: Have you all gone crazy? Was: On being web-friendly and why info must die

[Lennart Borgman <lennart.borgman@gmail.com>]

On Sat, Dec 20, 2014 at 3:26 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen@xemacs.org> wrote:
> Lennart Borgman writes:
>
>  > With HTML5 you can use "ajax" which can make it very fast to fetch
>  > small nodes. You simply just update that information on the web
>  > page (instead of fetching the whole web page).
>
> Sure.  However, doing AJAX well requires fairly sophisticated scripts,
> of the size that are typically compressed into an unreadable mishmash
> for web transport.  Do you have a GPL-compatible package in mind?

I think with HTML5 you do not need any package any longer. You just
write it in HTML5/EcmaScript. (I do these things very often now.)

> If you want to maintain multiple back
> ends, that could get rather messy if you need to keep it AJAX-
> compatible.

You can handle that very easily. Just write the normal HTML code and
then add EcmaScript events to the clickable links. If EcmaScript is
not turned on or not available then the normal HTML rules applies and
works. Otherwise the click event takes over and replaces the
appropriate part of the web page.

Of course you have to double the web page a bit. You have to write the
whole web page somewhere and the replaceable content somewhere else.
And you have to have code to bind these things together, but it does
not look like a very big job to me.

> I think all of these are likely to be resistance points without a
> proof of concept implementation.

Someone please give me a pointer to the code that writes the HTML
pages now. I have forgotten.