The Web's leading standards body released a long-delayed recommendation for using scripts in Web pages but urged coders not to rely too heavily on scripting.

News: W3C releases scripting standard, caveat
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommended on Thursday its Document Object Model (DOM) Level 2 HTML, a module of the group's set of application programming interfaces (APIs) for letting computer languages like JavaScript, Java or ECMAScript manipulate elements in an HTML or XHTML document.

In practical terms, the DOM makes it easier to create Web pages with features that are more animated and functional. With scripts, authors can make Web pages process forms, launch pop-up menus and windows, and execute style changes on the fly. Without the DOM, authors would have to code separately for each scripting language to interact with each different browser. The DOM is meant to create a "write once, run everywhere" standard for Web page scripting.

However, W3C staff urged developers to use scripts sparingly, criticizing the development technique as less efficient and accessible than alternative W3C-recommended methods of creating dynamic Web pages.

"The W3C is working on other specifications, including SVG, SMIL, and XForms, to move some commonly desired behaviors out of scripts," said Ian Jacobs, a W3C editor. "Scripting has its limitations."

The trouble with scripts, Jacobs said, is that they are less machine-readable or transparent than so-called declarative languages like SVG and SMIL.

"Scripts tend to do useful things, but in a way that's not obvious for machines to understand," Jacobs said. "I don't imagine a world where you could do everything in a nonscripting way, but it's very hard to know exactly what a script does. From the accessibility perspective, if everything is buried in a scripting language, then it's hard to find an alternative presentation of information. It's hard to repurpose the content."
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