[Seaside] Seaside sessions and ajax

smalltalk at fixinsbar.com smalltalk at fixinsbar.com
Thu Dec 6 19:51:42 UTC 2007


I agree, nothing beats constructive criticism. I liked to put my ideas  
out there and see what people say so that I can draw on the experience  
of others and factor in design problems I might not have otherwise seen.

FYI, I have been looking at AJAX toolkits a lot over the past few  
years and for some reason, they seem to often be developed by people  
who don't care about/use object oriented design principles. Maybe it's  
because a lot of them are so called "web" developers or with all due  
respect what I find to be a paradox, "PHP programmer."

I do concede doing things cross-browser is almost an impossibility. At  
some point if you are going to use AJAX, you are going to have to make  
compromises that you do not like. I would rather have a model that is  
a joy to program with and lets me do a lot then one that does a lot  
for me from the start but is a nightmare to use.

Quoting Sebastian Sastre <ssastre at seaswork.com>:

> For sure! but please don't get me wrong, at this stage the only one I'm
> trying to convince is myself about exactly what deserves the green light.
> The cheapest way I know to make the first filtering of bad ideas is to
> expose things to persons that use it's common sense and experience and are
> generous enough to criticize smartly. If concept survive by itself then
> deserves more so I think that experiments time on this is coming. Lets see
> what happen.
>
>     cheers,
>
> Sebastian Sastre
>
>
>
>
>   _____
>
> De: seaside-bounces at lists.squeakfoundation.org
> [mailto:seaside-bounces at lists.squeakfoundation.org] En nombre de Boris Popov
> Enviado el: Jueves, 06 de Diciembre de 2007 14:26
> Para: seaside at lists.squeakfoundation.org
> Asunto: Re: [Seaside] Seaside sessions and ajax
>
>
>
> Well, then you should just give that a go, trying to convince others will
> only get in the way ;)
>
> Cheers!
>
> -Boris
> (Sent from a BlackBerry)
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: seaside-bounces at lists.squeakfoundation.org
> <seaside-bounces at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
> To: 'Seaside - general discussion' <seaside at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
> Sent: Thu Dec 06 08:20:36 2007
> Subject: RE: [Seaside] Seaside sessions and ajax
>
> Hi Boris,
>
>     I don't see how practical and how much are used those in real life for
> "pages" of rich web applications. Anyway I just can't found a better way to
> achieve all that and also have that level of accesibility. Probably more
> aural features of html and css should be applied. I can custom CSS classes
> for components/subcomponets so if those classes are styled well enough it
> should work. If I'm right you can make aural properties using CSS to help
> accesibility.
>
> Again... "one problem at the time baby"...
>
>     cheers,
>
> Sebastian Sastre
>
>
> ________________________________
>
>         De: seaside-bounces at lists.squeakfoundation.org
> [mailto:seaside-bounces at lists.squeakfoundation.org] En nombre de Boris Popov
>         Enviado el: Jueves, 06 de Diciembre de 2007 13:50
>         Para: seaside at lists.squeakfoundation.org
>         Asunto: Re: [Seaside] Seaside sessions and ajax
>
>
>
>         Semantically sound html = easier styling and better accessibility.
> For instance screen readers place emphasis on h1 and h2 whereas they mostly
> ignore text styling.
>
>         Cheers!
>
>         -Boris
>         (Sent from a BlackBerry)
>
>         ----- Original Message -----
>         From: seaside-bounces at lists.squeakfoundation.org
> <seaside-bounces at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
>         To: 'Seaside - general discussion'
> <seaside at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
>         Sent: Thu Dec 06 07:38:13 2007
>         Subject: RE: [Seaside] Seaside sessions and ajax
>
>         > I don't want a DIV around all my components.
>         >
>
>         Thanks for the reading Lukas. I make some commments on each.
>
>         >   http://www.whatstyle.net/articles/22/less_div_more_html
>
>         Quoting it's stronger argument:
>         "It's cleaner, it has less code, and therefore; less clutter and
> lower
>         maintenance."
>
>         OK, I say: that is important if you deal with that code as a direct
> author.
>         Seasiders are not direct authors of their html. Scriptaculousiders
> also
>         aren't direct authors of most javascritp they use. Seaside spits all
>         serialized for you so you don't have to worry about it. That fact
> makes that
>         argument extreamely weak at least for the most heavy part: lower
>         maintenance.
>         Just to illustrate: all my wrapper divs are in 1 method of this
> seaside
>         compoents family that has 16 short lines (of those, 1 is the
> selector of the
>         method, 2 are comments and 3 are separations).
>
>         >   http://www.motive.co.nz/glossary/div.php
>         >
>         This author state he's counter divitis arguments in 3 parts:
>         1. complex code
>         I already deactivated this.
>
>         2. Quoting: "A web designer might add additional <div>s that are
> redundant
>         (in terms of the final design), but that allow for future revision
> to the
>         design. In some cases, redundant <div>s are required to account for
>         variations in that way that different web browsers interpret the CSS
>         language."
>
>         Here is being contradictive with himself by justifying why he do not
> make
>         allways what he promotes, so nothing to say.
>
>         3. Quoting: "Less-experienced webpage authors will often use a <div>
> in
>         place of a more semantically-appropriate HTML element. For example,
> they
>         might use a <div> and CSS to style text to look like a heading,
> rather than
>         using an HTML heading element (<h1>, <h2>,<h3>, etc.)."
>
>         I agree and should add that is *only* valued by webdesigners elite
> (which I
>         don't give a dime for). Not one single user will value more a
> heading that
>         looks like a header because it *is* a <h1> instead of a syled <div>
> nor that
>         will make you gain more money, so... as I stated, I don't give a
> dime to
>         HTML and or CSS beauty code. Html is conceptually poor and is doing
> what it
>         can to evolve so why I should be a devote admirer of a languange
> designed
>         bad from start? I'll, by no mean, be of the "beauty html" religion.
> It's not
>         a language for persons nor for machines. Let user agents to deal
> with it.
>
>         End users don't want to look your html, they should not and they
> ever will.
>         So if costs are the problem I say that technologies that spit html
> for you
>         will make that argument insignificant.
>
>         Besides they are talking mostly for pages that have extreamely
> simple
>         layouts: 1 (one) container (probably body)with 3 or 4 colums with a
> liquid
>         center. I want/need and talking about here, of having the chance of
>         composing ANY seaside component (of this family) trivially in an
> arbitrary
>         order of magnitude with border layout (see example:
>         http://extjs.com/deploy/dev/examples/layout/complex.html). I gave a
> quick
>         look in the app I'm working on and counted 9 levels deep of border
> layout to
>         reach the div that wraps a button in a medium-simple form. When I
> can I'll
>         show you some so you can firebug that insane html (firebug thank you
> for
>         exist).
>
>         > > The fact is that didn't stop me yet of doing anything. Besides
>         > > behavior, if you're valuing the elegance of the html I would
> agree.
>         > > The html would seem heavy but todays it can travel deflated
>         > by apache.
>         > > Besides The structure of what I have rendered on the user agent
> is
>         > > kind of homogeneus in nature even in a high degree of
>         > composition. I
>         > > know that it should be the designer's problem but I think I've
> also
>         > > have solved a priori most of the positioning problems with this.
> By
>         > > having a little painful experience on layouting things in
>         > html you may know how valuable this could be.
>         >
>         > I don't see how these DIVs could be valuable for a designer,
>         > as they are probably auto generated. What worried me
>         > initially was that I had the impression that you wanted to
>         > put a DIV around every component.
>         >
>         I may not let that clear enough. I don't want to force anything in
> Seaside
>         normal components hierarchy. Just a family of components that work
> like
>         this. Designers 99.9% probably get scared when see that html because
> they
>         are so used to manage html manually or semi-manually. But they
> should not.
>         This industrial way of using divs is meant to provide power. Power
> when you
>         use them with an associated CSS class (that by the way I also
> generate
>         automatically). The worst for webdesigners is the part they'll see
>         compromised CSS cascading capabilities. Several properties are
> repeated in
>         the CSS but is not that bad as it sounds. OK, my CSS is 14KB and it
> is
>         promising keep growing firmly but it goes deflated and ends cached
> anyway.
>
>         > > So I say we can scale
>         > > that to make a family of components that are also AJAXianly
>         > backtrackeable.
>         > > Those components have the trade off of having to be identifiable
> in
>         > > the DOM and capable of setting it's innerHTML (that's why
>         > I've choosed
>         > > to wrapp with div containers).
>         >
>         > That makes sense.
>         >
>         > > If those components have to exists in a different hierarchy
>         > other than
>         > > WAComponent let's be it.
>         >
>         > Sure that's a detail. I don't see any problems in starting
>         > with a subclass of WAComonent, I just feel that maybe later
>         > on you might want to choose a different superclass.
>         > WAComponent provides a lot of functionality that might not be
>         > too useful in your context.
>         >
>         OK, later we can review that in the name of refactoring and clean
> Smalltalk
>         code :)
>
>         > > I thought in continuations because how Seaside works. Suposing
> AJAX
>         > > did not exists, Seaside maps one unique url per
>         > reandereable action.
>         > > What I was thinking is that we can map those rendereable
>         > actions also
>         > > to AJAX style of render elements: updaters. If the problem
>         > to solve is
>         > > backtrack rendereable actions, no matter if they are full
>         > or partial,
>         > > I think Seaside is the winner because of continuations (I say
> this
>         > > because one can go back and forward in different "branches"
>         > of actions
>         > > and as far as I know only continuations handle that).
>         >
>         > So far, I don't see any use of continuations. Seaside only
>         > uses continuations to wait in the middle of a method for the
>         > next request, e.g. with #call: and #answer:. The state
>         > backtracking has nothing to do with continuations (with the
>         > exception of the method-temps that are part of a suspended
> method).
>         >
>         Now you let me thinking!.. I didn't realize that. I should take a
> reading on
>         how those methods work. Oh, I get it with the updaters we are not
>         interrupting any method execution in the middle right? Sure man,
> that is
>         only a need if we want to make a kind of #call: to works with AJAX.
> Ok, this
>         is the "one problem at the time baby" hour so we let that for a
> second
>         stage, I bet is solvable.
>
>         So I need to understand better how Seaside maintain things
> backtrakable.
>         What do you suggest me to read?
>
>                 Cheers,
>
>         Sebastian
>
>         > > I'm still thinking loud here so please feel free to feedback,
>         >
>         > Interesting discussion.
>         >
>         > Cheers,
>         > Lukas
>         >
>         > --
>         > Lukas Renggli
>         > http://www.lukas-renggli.ch
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