Re: Modernizing

Well, I can't do much about your personal preferences for "Native
HTML". I'm not even sure what that means - that it doesn't look like
the desktop? The point of rich UI is to make web applications LESS like
a browser and more like a native desktop application.

That aside, I do know that Dojo is designed to be fully compliant with
Section 508, and to support accessibility (also known as a11y) features
throughout. That's one of the benefits of frameworks; you don't have to
reinvent the wheel for things like a11y and i18n (internationalization).

Really, it's not that big a deal. I just suggest that you take a little
more time to research the available frameworks. It might really save
you a lot of development time, and would also benefit your users by
providing a consistent interface. And yes, if you want to ask questions
about frameworks, we can certainly start a thread on WEB400.

Joe

In my (admittedly limited) research of JavaScript frameworks, it seems
like you tend to have less control over the HTML output that
JavaScript generates and they feel like they are created in
JavaScript. They don't have a native HTML feel. I must say that I have
been hand-coding HTML and adding some jQuery to add dynamic features
to my applications. The other big negative is how do screen readers
(that the blind uses) work with these JavaScript frameworks. My guess
is that they don't.

Here in Government we are now mandated to make sure our websites are
accessible to the disabled. (Not sure on exact ruling). So this is
always something I need to think about as I develop new applications.

If you want to continue this, lets move it to Web400.

--
Mike Wills
http://mikewills.me



On Tue, Oct 18, 2011 at 3:34 PM, Joe Pluta<joepluta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I'm not sure what you mean by this, Mike. In the majority of
frameworks, the underlying document is HTMLm with JavaScript added to
provide those features HTML doesn't support. For example, a DataGrid in
Dojo is an HTML table, but with JavaScript attached to events to provide
things like sorting.

Actually, you should really like Dojo because among all the frameworks I
think it's the best in providing both a markup language variant (which
is basically just HTML with extra tags) and a programmatic syntax that
can be used by generation tools such as EGL.

Joe

The only problem I have with most of these newer frameworks is that
they rely heavily on JavaScript and not so much on HTML. This is
mostly personal preference here, but I like to do must of the display
in HTML and use JavaScript only when needed. I realize why these
products are using JavaScript frameworks as it is much easier to work
with, but that is something to think about as you research them.

Personally, here I think we will probably do ASP.NET MVC front-ends
and use the existing RPG business logic on the back-end.