HTML6 proposal for single-page apps without JavaScript

so...iframes?

Other members are worried this is just shifting complexity for no real value. A mistake they did in the past.

https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-whatwg-archive/2...

My opinion too.

I really don't like this proposal. For me, HTML is the markup for the design of the page, while JavaScript makes up the logic. While some frameworks break this, they are strictly opt-in, and they still offer a bit of separation of duties. I'd rather see the HTML standard stay markup-focus for now.

I think we should keep HTML simple and enforce a strict separation between template and logic. However, I do like the idea of adding a native "model" attribute to the DOM element that can automatically get/parse json and update accordingly.

I'm not necessarily opposed to something along these lines, except that it's basically already been tried: XSLT was essentially the inverse of this, where data endpoints were annotated with some static rendering descriptors. To me the XSLT approach seems cleaner, in that the URLs the browser is visiting are for the raw data itself, the URL scheme between machine and human is identical, and so on. XSLT also encouraged producing network-friendly compound representations for data, rather than the typical small collection of pure CRUD endpoints over fixed structures (/users/1, /comments/1231, etc.), since XSLT had limited ability to trigger loading external data without falling back to Javascript hacks or similar.

But I imagine the tragic flaw in both the data binding proposal here and how XSLT worked is massively increased complexity for fairly little gain - and I think that's why XSLT has died a gentle death over the past decade.

Still, both ideas appeal to me from the perspective of escaping horrendous chunks of procedural macros being shipped with data just to make it render on the client.