Off topic? javascript and css?

Off topic, at least a little:

I'm new to css, but I must say I like it a lot.
I like separating styling from content.
I do a lot with php's Smarty Template for the same reason.

Thanks to this group plus various websites (positioniseverything et
al)
learning how to code for decent browsers, and then making
hacks to coerce Ie6 and Ie7 into submission wasn't all that hard.

Based on that experience, plus good luck with Google's GWT libraries
(code in java, compile to javascript, in order to make complex,
application-like, web-based GUIs) I decided to look at Javascript
again.
That was a mistake. Just about everything interesting
(like dynamically modifying styles) is still a browser wars nightmare.
Google has done a good job with GWT. Their browser-sniffing and
behind-the-scenes compatibility libraries are great. But coding
in Java in order to make relatively simple websites is ugly. And GWT
builds table-based layouts. Their css support is sketchy at best.

Microsoft will never willingly help Gecko.
So, how hard would it be for Firefox, Opera and Safari to include
support
the Microsoft event model, plus a few more non-standard Microsoft
quirks?
Dynamic re-styling, determined by mouse and keyboard events,
could be a great thing.

Maybe this is the wrong place to wonder about this. But it is
the css I'd like to modify, via javascript (works just fine
in Firefox, but what good is that?).

On 8 Nov, 22:49, salmobytes <Sandy.Pittendr... (AT) gmail (DOT) com> wrote:

Google has done a good job with GWT.

They haven't. It's a piece of crap that pisses away resources left,
right and centre. It might be easy to use, it might be OK for a one-
off tiny application that's used for one page and discarded. If you
try and use it for intranet web applicatiosn though, where a browser
stays in the same app through a whole working day, then GWT's problems
will soon appear to you.

On Nov 9, 2:45 am, Andy Dingley <ding... (AT) codesmiths (DOT) com> wrote:

On 8 Nov, 22:49, salmobytes <Sandy.Pittendr... (AT) gmail (DOT) com> wrote:

Google has done a good job with GWT.

They haven't. It's a piece of crap that pisses away resources left,
right and centre. It might be easy to use, it might be OK for a one-
off tiny application that's used for one page and discarded. If you
try and use it for intranet web applicatiosn though, where a browser
stays in the same app through a whole working day, then GWT's problems
will soon appear to you.

I have used it, a lot. GWT has its quirks, memory leaks, etc.
But we found we could work around those problems. It's handy,
for instance, to be able to send database updates off to
the server based on dropdown menu events (user
adds a new choice for his personal version of a database insert
form). For our purposes (database inserts describing complex
laboratory experiments, where the user often has to add new
descriptive menus on the fly) we were happy with GWT.
I though it worked well for complex GUI screens.
I wouldn't want use it for standard website pages.

Even if they haven't *done a good job* they have implemented
most of the Java programming language in Javascript.
And that--at the very least--illustrates the power we could
have had, if *we* all hadn't been force to pay the price
for the browser wars.

You could modifly styles and positioning dynamically, based
on a lot more that just mouse over a link.