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

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
<[hidden email]> wrote: _______________________________________________
seaside mailing list
[hidden email]
http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/seaside

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.
_______________________________________________
seaside mailing list
[hidden email]
http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/seaside

Fritz,

On 18.02.2011, at 01:31, Fritz Schenk wrote:

you are right regarding code completion. I think we all can agree that it would be a good thing to have a code completion tool that is capable of what you want. But we don't have it at this time. I'm sure it will be there not far from now but... And if you talk about the early nineties than you probably couldn't imagine back then that there could be such thing like autocompletion. And with your knowledge about HTML you couldn't achieve much nowadays. And you wouldn't know what javascript is at all ;)
The html canvas is an _integration_ of two technologies: HTML and smalltalk. So there are some alternatives how to implement them. You can make one technology look like the other (making seaside methods exactly the same like HTML) or you can try to enrich both sides with their counterpart. Seaside is the latter one and you prefer the first one. Well, that's it, it is just not like you expected it. And there is no reason to change it if you listen to what others are saying. Furthermore you can take Boris' advice. Overwriting canvas and add your convenience tags is a no effort.
Bringing javascript into the mix makes them three technologies to intermix. Here the integration is much more complicated because the integration target is far apart. So you can inject pieces of javascript code into the stream of html and see what happens. That is a common way of doing it. If you use SQL then the statement is not checked before you send it to the database. It is evaluated remotely. And that is the same here. Even In javascript itself (in the browser) you don't have the ability to check the code without doing an eval (which is the compiler). Beside the syntax errors there is a big bunch of other problems where you would need to take all your injected javascript parts etc.
I don't want to argue that this cannot be improved. I'm just wondering from where you take your expectations.

Norbert_______________________________________________
seaside mailing list
[hidden email]
http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/seaside

_______________________________________________
seaside mailing list
[hidden email]
http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/seaside

a for anchor, h1... for heading, p for paragraph, I always thought them to be abbreviations of the long texts, so there was mostly nothing new to learn, when I switched from html to Seaside's HTMLBuilder.



_______________________________________________
seaside mailing list
[hidden email]
http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/seaside

>>>>> "Fritz" == Fritz Schenk <[hidden email]> writes:

Fritz> it is a trap for new users.

It's only a trap for users who are new to smalltalk, but have already
been corrupted by the brokenness of other languages.

If you *start* with Smalltalk and Seaside, the naming convention seems
perfectly sane.

--
Randal L. Schwartz - Stonehenge Consulting Services, Inc. - +1 503 777 0095
<[hidden email]> <URL:http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/>
Smalltalk/Perl/Unix consulting, Technical writing, Comedy, etc. etc.
See http://methodsandmessages.posterous.com/ for Smalltalk discussion
_______________________________________________
seaside mailing list
[hidden email]
http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/seaside

You dont have to use the seaside methods... you can just use strings
if it suits you.

On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 4:36 PM, Fritz Schenk
<[hidden email]> wrote:
> Sebastian, you say a 'decent autocompleter';
> To say <a> and its attributes you have to say anchor. The autocompleter does not
> say anything else about callback, url, attributes, etc.
>
> _______________________________________________
> seaside mailing list
> [hidden email]
> http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/seaside
>
_______________________________________________
seaside mailing list
[hidden email]
http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/seaside

You could also just skip the whole seaside shtick altogether and use php with emacs <g>

-Boris

-----Original Message-----
From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Sean Allen
Sent: Friday, February 18, 2011 3:58 PM
To: Seaside - general discussion
Subject: Re: [Seaside] Re: Why - XHTML perfectly good names are now given enSeaside new names

You dont have to use the seaside methods... you can just use strings if it suits you.

On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 4:36 PM, Fritz Schenk <[hidden email]> wrote:
> Sebastian, you say a 'decent autocompleter'; To say <a> and its
> attributes you have to say anchor. The autocompleter does not say
> anything else about callback, url, attributes, etc.
>
> _______________________________________________
> seaside mailing list
> [hidden email]
> http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/seaside
>
_______________________________________________
seaside mailing list
[hidden email]
http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/seaside

_______________________________________________
seaside mailing list
[hidden email]
http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/seaside

Stuart, you are not getting the point. The names in XHTML (and HTML) are
arbitrary of course, they could have chosen some thing else back in 1990.
However, why give them alternate names that new Seaside users need now learn to
use?
Thanks

_______________________________________________
seaside mailing list
[hidden email]
http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/seaside

Tony , thanks for acknowledging my position.
I reserve opinion on whether it is better to say '<a herf...> and
'anchor url...>.
Obviously the <a href....> is directly translatable..


_______________________________________________
seaside mailing list
[hidden email]
http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/seaside

I hate to keep feeding this, but really, you just used term
'translation' yourself, which by definition is,

- a written communication in a second language having the same meaning
as the written communication in a first language
- transformation: the act of changing in form or shape or appearance
- rewording something in less technical terminology

In all fairness, a number of people had expressed their opinions as to
"why" it is the way it is, I'm not sure if you're advocating a change
(for which a solution would be to make Seaside-OldSkool yourself to wrap
everything with names that match the specs) or simply looking to keep a
discussion going for no good reason.

-Boris

-----Original Message-----
From: [hidden email]
[mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Fritz
Schenk
Sent: Friday, February 18, 2011 4:17 PM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: [Seaside] Re: Why - XHTML perfectly good names are now givenen
Seaside new names

Tony , thanks for acknowledging my position.
I reserve opinion on whether it is better to say '<a herf...> and
'anchor url...>.
Obviously the <a href....> is directly translatable..


_______________________________________________
seaside mailing list
[hidden email]
http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/seaside
_______________________________________________
seaside mailing list
[hidden email]
http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/seaside

Boris , thanks for your opinion. The subject of the thread states accurately my
curiosity about the decisions to use a different approach in Seaside.

_______________________________________________
seaside mailing list
[hidden email]
http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/seaside

Norbert, excellent points. Most of these devices to help coding were available
in smalltalk back at Xerox Park in 1980. So nothing new about code completion.
Simply theway it is done for Seaside, it is incomplete when trying to do HTML,
JavasScript, jQuery, etc.
The subject of the thread was wondering why invent another vocabulary and was
just for curiosity of the decisions made by Avi and others.


_______________________________________________
seaside mailing list
[hidden email]
http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/seaside

I guess the simplest answer to your original question is:
The reason Seaside does not use XHTML tag names as-is is because
Seaside is not a wrapper, it is an abstraction.

(X)HTML was designed to be transmitted as-is over a slow network,
therefore when considering the trade-off between readability and
brevity, the designers of HTML chose brevity as the most important
concern.

Seaside is a framework designed to be used by humans, that will not be
sent as-is over a slow network (instead it uses HTML to do that),
Therefore the compromise goes the other direction - human readability
is in this case more important than brevity.

The other consideration is that thinking in terms of tag names instead
of the concepts they represent is a very 1998 way of thinking of HTML.
 Semantic markup makes what the tags _mean_ more important than the
name of the tag, so in that way, Seaside's choice can also help
improve design.

On Sat, Feb 19, 2011 at 8:11 AM, Fritz Schenk
<[hidden email]> wrote: _______________________________________________
seaside mailing list
[hidden email]
http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/seaside

On 02/18/2011 04:24 PM, Stuart Herring wrote:
> I guess the simplest answer to your original question is:
> The reason Seaside does not use XHTML tag names as-is is because
> Seaside is not a wrapper, it is an abstraction.

A simpler answer might be, Smalltalker's just generally don't like
abbreviations in code, they like words that can be read aloud and spoken
about without sounding absurd.  When you talk about html, you talk about
anchors, paragraphs, headings, orderedLists, unorderedLists, etc.
That's why they're better selectors.

--
Ramon Leon
http://onsmalltalk.com
_______________________________________________
seaside mailing list
[hidden email]
http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/seaside

Fritz Schenk wrote:
> Robert, depends on the beholder of the language. For people having used html
> since 1992, introducing something new is questionable and rather than beautiful
> it is a trap for new users.

If I knew HTML I wouldn't choose Seaside. I don't even want too look at HTML and
javascript.


--
Milan Mimica
http://sparklet.sf.net
_______________________________________________
seaside mailing list
[hidden email]
http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/seaside

In fact, Milan, I chose Seaside precisely not to have to look at that stuff. It's nice to just program away and let the framework provide all the rendering packages.
_______________________________________________
seaside mailing list
[hidden email]
http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/seaside

On Sat, Feb 19, 2011 at 12:33 AM, Ramon Leon <[hidden email]> wrote:
That was (and remains) the reason: it's what feels natural in
Smalltalk. Can we please stop talking about this?

Julian
_______________________________________________
seaside mailing list
[hidden email]
http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/seaside

Julian, Ramon, Stuart, Boris, Stephen, Richard, Nick, Robert, Sebastian, Sean,
Randal, Norbert:

This really hit a nerve!
But the reason to include this thread was genuine curiosity as to the reason
for doing it the 'Seaside-way'.

Thanks for acknowledging, and all your very considered comments.

For your reference I include the message that instigated me to include the
thread:http://www.jarober.com/blog/blogView?entry=3453959334.

All those gyrations and messy workarounds to deal with incompatibilities with
2.8 to 3.0 - Note that HTML 4.0 was stable during the past 5 or so years.

When you look at tutorials, in the short course of four years, there are
numerous ways to do Seaside from 2.7, 2.8,to 3.0. Pretty much guaranteed that
examples do not run in the latest.

A lot of you reference to the concept of 'smalltalkers do it that way' - I do
agree that 'between(x,x1,x2)' is somewhat more obscure than
'x between: x1 and: x2'.

I would like to know what Alan Kay feels about this.





_______________________________________________
seaside mailing list
[hidden email]
http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/seaside

Hi Milan,

>If I knew HTML I wouldn't choose Seaside. I don't even want too look at HTML and
>javascript.

I wouldn't go quite that far but I know what you mean and agree.  But I
think that even people who know HTML can benefit greatly from Seaside.

Lou
-----------------------------------------------------------
Louis LaBrunda
Keystone Software Corp.
SkypeMe callto://PhotonDemon
mailto:[hidden email] http://www.Keystone-Software.com

_______________________________________________
seaside mailing list
[hidden email]
http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/seaside