Came across an interesting article by Jeremy Keith about "Behavioral Separation" in HTML. The basic premise is explained in the except below (refer the article for more details) -
Unobtrusive JavaScript is a relatively new idea. Try it out for yourself.
- Begin with your content,
- give it structure with semantically descriptive markup,
- apply a presentation layer using CSS, and finally,
- add a behavior layer with DOM Scripting.
As Web UIs become richer, the complexity of the page keeps increasing by leaps & bounds. Separating the content from the layout from the interaction is becoming challenging, at the very least, and downright unmaintainable, in it's worst manifestations.
Unobtrusive Javascript combined with CSS 2.0 seems to be the answer. Now, can we ensure that we reach till the point where complete separation of the 3 elements is possible?
