On unobtrusive javascript

This is a short rant that was originally part of my HTML forms write-up, but that I took out, because it became too long.

I haven't been writing unobtrusive javascript for at least a decade, and perhaps that was a mistake, but it was also inevitable. In my own defense: it seems HTML is actually quite incoherent... Yup, I just wrote that. I mean, you have tags that denote text levels, similar to those used in text processing software, like paragraph, header, blockquote and (later on) the HTML5 semantic tag set. You also have tags that denote some concrete representational blocks that can be considered part of the document flow, like img and table, or more generic tags that can be used to manipulate document flow, like div or span. The hyperlink is the VIP of the web, and a different beast altogether. Then there's the form, with its controls, which isn't representational at all, but primarily functional.

I think the distinction between representational and functional elements in HTML has been underestimated, and led to the explosion of (very obtrusive) javascript libraries to create class-based widgets. At least they were generic enough, and controllable through a well-described API. The standard that eventually evolved from this, namely web components, is no different. Although it may fill the gap between built-in markup and custom, javascript-enriched bundles of functionality, it's still mainly this functionality we're after, not text layout. Calling a class-based object an HTML element doesn't really change anything.

Finally, there's the argument that we should use meaningful (or semantic) tags. But there's nothing semantic about HTML itself. The semantic tag set that was added to HTML5 denotes text layout, which may be meaningful to browsers and text processing software, but not necessarily to humans. We should take people with disabilities into account when writing web applications, and for that it's helpful to specify the parts of document flow. But it's a formality that can also be controlled through application code. In the worst case, thinking semantically the HTML5 way impairs programmatic control and generics, simply making it harder to automate the process of creating web applications.

Ironically, semantic tagging is no longer the domain of markup, and moves in the direction of data. Yes, we're back where we started: markup and data are again separated. JSON-LD is an initiative that's quite new, but it enables consumers of public web API's to retrieve information in an automated fashion. This means we only have to decide what to automate: or we write programs that generate separate representations for humans and machines, or we write programs that generate a mix of meaning and functionality in HTML, sprinkled with some unobtrusive javascript.

So I'm like, yeah, whatever man, whatever.

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