Scripting

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Bye Beehive II # Dhtml is dead, long live dhtml!

Beehive II will not be finished, It is officially dead. Websites that offer complex scripts with hundres upon hundreds of lines of code for things that can also be done with proper html, a bit of css, and three lines of dom script, are relics of an age gone by - And rightfully so. Although Beehive II is DOM based it still represents the concept of 1 wrapper around different document object models, and I have come to believe that the best a wrapper could possibly achieve is to be merely equal to the implementation(s) it represents; Even if it were perfect, it would never be better than the original thing.

One of beehive's purposes was to make animating things easy, and I do believe it did a nice job at that. However - as far as animation is concerned - flash is often a way better solution to make things move about, even though my personal (very biassed) preference might disagree with that. Every problem has a preferred solution; One that is not based on personal opinion, but on simple facts. Dhtml will do for simple animations, but for that a dhtml library is overkill.

So what should dhtml do today? The same it always did (aside from the cheesy crap) and more - thanks to things like xmlHttp - just as long as you let html, css and domscript do what they're intended to do, and not script everything. ;)