Re: [9front] Musings on web browsers and office applications

[an2qzavok@gmail.com]

> That's intriguing. What are those edge cases?
My memory of HTML standard is fading...

Main issue is all the elements that have extra state associated with them.
Sometimes data needs to be fetched from outside (img, link), fetching can be 
non-trivial and controled by client software (source) or user (audio, video).
Sometimes data is provided by user (text input fields, radio buttons), or 
generated by scripts (canvas)
Very often data needs to be processed before use (decoding videos, resizing 
images)
iframe is nasty in particular because it's not just static data but another 
whole DOM instance.

Another issue is various metadata, for example style properties. Those need to 
be derived from multiple sources (some of them external, i.e. linked css)  and 
can be changed by scripts and need to be recomputed.

And a real showstopper is dynamic/OOP nature of the DOM, where nodes have many 
methods depending on their type (around 12 of them) and can be created, 
destroyed and rearranged right under user's feet.

It's hard to draw a line on where handling all of this belongs, fileserver or 
it's client. The more work we push on the client, the less useful server 
becomes, but doing things in server ruins all our hopes of having nice and 
clean file structure and doesn't make client's work any easier, only different 
kind of complicated.

(Huh, I guess these are not really edge cases, these are meat and bones of 
HTML now. Sorry for the confusion.)