The Poor Man’s XML Data Island
The poor man’s XML Data Island is a form element that contains input elements where type="hidden". What you have, effectively, is a set of client-side, name-value pairs that are backwards compatible with even the most pathetic implementation of HTML. You know, it’s the simple stuff folks… You see, I am not impressed with these Web 2.0 JavaScript frameworks. I want small JavaScript files. I want the JavaScript function to be the largest programming block as much as possible.
Recently I am enthralled with having these JavaScript functions have very little dependence on “global” variables and very little “horizontal dependence” on each other. Most of these functions should confine their dependencies on the XHTML they support. So instead of “globals” I would rather use my poor-man data island to store page-scope meta-data. These little forms remind me of the app.config files in Windows Forms. They look like this:<form id="AppProperties" action="#" onsubmit="return false;">
<input id="ArticlesFilterIndex" type="hidden" value="0" />
<input id="SubjectIds" type="hidden" value="" />
</form>
These design goals violate that dream, that I think Macromedia made famous and Microsoft is now spending millions on in their Windows Presentation Foundation push (namely, with Microsoft Expression), where there is this workflow featuring an in-house or on-call designer working with his stuff and we visually-impaired developers work with our stuff. So, in that brave-new-retro world, application meta-data should not be mixed in with design-related, user-interface markup. It’s been a few years. I look forward to the day when I am frustrated with my “design team” walking all over my meta-data… In the mean time there is the poor man’s XML data island.