Jim Davis wrote:
Richard Cornford wrote: Jim Davis wrote: Richard Cornford wrote: <snip> (The group's stated "context of use" assumption (as stated
in the FAQ); that we are discussing a public Internet use,
applies here as the OP mentioned no other context.)
<snip>
I say this with respect: while not in the c.l.j. FAQ it's
generally considered appropriate and courteous to first
attempt to resolve such matters privately.
I don't see anything that needs to be resolved privately. Generally (and
excluding matters internal to personal relationships) I think that if
something is worth saying it should be possible to say it in public.
Thus giving third parties an opportunity to express any opinions they
may have on the subject.
Suffice to say I neither agree with your assumptions
about my comments or with your interpertation of the FAQ
in this instance.
That is interesting. The subject of default assumptions has been
discussed many times before but previously the interpretation of the
FAQ's statement has not been disputed. The issues have previously been
whether the default assumption is the correct/appropriate assumption,
and whether is it reasonable to have a default assumption at all.
However, the situation as expressed in the FAQ is likely to stand until
a practical alternative is proposed, and experience suggests that a
practical alternative will not be proposed.
You may, if you like, attempt to answer unqualified questions on the
group in a way suited to each and all contexts in which the question
could be asked, but you will find that the attempt rapidly exhausts you.
Consider someone vaguely asking about interacting with form controls;
their real context might be a public Internet, or a browser specific
Intranet, or scripting an Adobe Acrobat document, or Flash, or
javascript imbedded an any number of arbitrary applications that have
some concept of 'form control'. A complete response would need to be
sizeable, and a large percentage of it would inevitably be irrelevant to
the individual asking the question in their single context. It simply is
not a practical approach, made even less practical by an appreciation of
the full spectrum of possible applications of javascript.
Something has to be assumed (in the absence of specifics in the
question) in order to make responding at all practical. But there are
significant issues in having everyone make their own arbitrary
assumptions. Suppose, for example, that someone wants to conceal chrome
in the current browser instance and a respondent assumes the question
applies to Netscape/Mozilla browsers in a limited set of circumstances
and so proposed the switching of the - window.locationbar.visible,
window.statusbar.visible, etc - properties. The OP then goes of and
tries it running on the local file system and discovers that it works
(at least in the version they are using for testing), and thinks they
have a solution. Only to later discover that their public Internet
context allows no such thing, for security reasons and because the
properties are unknown to most browsers.
Not that there is anything wrong with someone providing an answer to an
unqualified question that is only applicable to a specific browser,
browser version or context of scripting, so long as they say so (and so
don't potentially send an OP off down a blind ally).
But if a single assumption made in response to unqualified questions is
going to be totally arbitrary then every answer needs to state to
context to which it is applicable. The advantage of assuming that one
default context (public Internet use) applies to all questions that do
not express another contexts is that it saves everyone form explicitly
stating the context whenever that default assumption is applicable. Thus
the default assumption should be the context that applies to the largest
proportion of questions asked (to save the effort of the largest number
of people).
As I have said, if a more practical approach is available I (and
probably many others) would like to here about it.
<snip> But is the browser a client if there is no server?
Yes - or at the very least it may be. The point is simply
that the client may download an application from a server
and run it locally. The browser is still a client of that
server, but the APPLICATION may or may not be.
<snip>
Your definition of "no server" appears to involve slightly more
servers than mine does.
You're missing the point... somebody suggested that an application
running in a browser client-side might use a client-side database.
You asked "is a browser a client if there is no server" implying that
no server was involved.
One of us may be missing the point here, but I was responding to:-
| For that matter, client-only applications can simply use DHTML
| as a display device, and never connect to a server.
In which the use of the word 'only' (implying isolation) in
"client-only" and particularly the words "never connect to a server"
suggest that there is no server involved. I asked whether a browser was
a client when there was no server with the intention of suggesting that
the term "client-only" was a misnomer. The onlyness in the situation
seeming to preclude the client relationship.
Richard.
