| 1. Shadow DOM scopes down what CSS selectors can match, so deep structures can hide elements from expensive CSS rules. 2. Custom Elements promote a declarative approach to development, as opposed to having JS render everything. 3. XHTML was not the same as Shadow DOM/Custom Elements. XHTML allowed produce custom DSL variants of XHTML, but you still ended up having to implement them in native code as trying to polyfill SVG for example would be horrendously inefficient. 4. The weakness of the web is the lack of composeability due to lack of encapsulation. Shit leaks, and leaks all over the page. Some third party JS widget can be completely fucked up by CSS in your page and vice versa. A further weakness is precisely the move to presentation style markup. Modern web apps are using the document almost as if it were a PostScript environment, and frankly, that sucks. We are seeing an explosion of "single page apps" that store their data in private data silos, and fetch them via XHRs, rendering into a div-soup. The strength of the web was publishing information in a form that a URL represented the knowledge. Now the URL merely represents a <script> tag that then fires off network requires to download data and display after the fact. Search engines have had to deal with this new world by making crawlers effectively execute URLs. I find this to be a sad state of effects, because whether you agree or not, the effect is to diminish the transparency of information. You give me an HTML page, and I can discover lots of content in the static DOM itself, and I can trace links from that document to other sources of information. You give me a SinglePageApp div-soup app that fetches most of its content via XHR? I can't do jack with that until I execute it. The URL-as-resource has become URL-as-executable-code. IMHO, the Web needs less Javascript, not more. |