[Seaside] Why - XHTML perfectly good names are now given en Seaside new names

[Tony Fleig]

I am in a similar position, having programmed raw HTML since the early days
of Mosaic and  now using Seaside. I have used a number of frameworks over
the years for web and other things. There is always something to learn and
it usually takes some getting used to and experience with the framework
before the benefits of whatever the something is become apparent.

I too was initially annoyed by Seaside's XHTML "sub-language", but after
getting used to it I can now say that I very much prefer creating XHTML
pages with Seaside than "by hand." There are many reasons in addition to the
element naming for this, but the element naming is part of it.

Having said that, I think the auto-compete in Pharo/Seaside, while useful,
is not nearly as useful as that in, say, Microsoft's Visual Studio. Yes, I
know I am free to improve it myself, but I actually am interested in
building web apps at the moment, not Pharo developer tools.

For comparison, Illiad uses #a where Seaside uses #anchor, and #p where
Seaside uses #paragraph, etc. I have build a couple of Illiad apps, and I
find the Seaside code I produced easier to interpret when perusing it later
than the Illiad code I produced.

Regards,
TF


On Fri, Feb 18, 2011 at 6:01 AM, Stuart Herring
<st-lists at stuartherring.com>wrote:

> I guess the problem here is making the assumption that the XHTML tag
> names are "perfectly good".
> The alternative position is  that they're not.
>
> Really, what is an "a"?  It's just a letter, and what does "href" even
> mean?
> The XHTML spec doesn't introduce the <a> tag by saying "This is an
> 'A'", it says it's an Anchor, which is represented in an XHTML
> document as an 'a'.
> Seaside is not XHTML, it emits XHTML, so why should the human
> interface (Seaside source code), use a Machine interface (XHTML) as
> its language?  It makes far more sense to use the human terms rather
> than the machine terms for something that is going to be used by
> humans.
>
> That's how I see it, anyway.  I understand that when you're used to
> dealing directly with HTML that having to find out the seaside terms
> adds a bit of a learning curve, but only because the tools you've used
> in the past have forced you to deal directly with the machine
> representation.  I guess the easiest way to adapt is to stop thinking
> in terms of the characters used in HTML, but instead think in terms of
> the actual words the characters represent.
>
> Regards,
> Stuart
>
>
> On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 2:21 PM, Fritz Schenk
> <intrader.intrader at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I don't think that the decision of using new names (for example paragraph
> for
> > <p>) is such a good idea.
> >
> > Why was it done?
> >
> > Thanks
> >
> > P.A. Wow the captcha for this post is 'crusade'
> >
> >
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