We're talking about web applications and Web 2.0 sites, which is the principal target of Rails and its ilk. For primarily static content-oriented sites, static HTML works just fine, but even in this case, you can do dynamic transformations on the HTML in order to provide a richer, more user-friendly surfing experience.
It's only a matter of time until browsers provide better accessibility for web apps and search engines start indexing JavaScript-generated content.
The era of HTML templates and heavy server-side HTML is coming to a close, for all but static content-oriented websites. The whole industry is moving in a dynamic direction (along with developer tools and libraries), and it would be a shame if a bunch of Haskell developers got together to write a really great Haskell web framework for the Internet as it was 5 years ago.
Times have changed. Haskell -> JavaScript is a much more fruitful direction to pursue, I think.
Regards,
John A. De Goes
N-BRAIN, Inc.
The Evolution of Collaboration
On Jan 26, 2009, at 10:49 AM, Michael Snoyman wrote:
On Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 9:37 AM, John A. De Goes
<john@n-brain.net> wrote:
The best approach is to push as much functionality into the client as possible. The ideal server-side framework consists of nothing more than a permissions-based interface to persistence and network services. That's it. Everything else is done on the client side, in JavaScript.
Web designers can pretty easily style dynamically generated HTML, if the semantics are good -- you just need to let them capture that HTML in any given part of the application.
What this means is that effort is probably best directed at Yhc/JavaScript and similar projects, which compile Haskell to JavaScript for execution on the client. Sure, some server-side work needs to be done, but it's extremely minimal. Far more needs to be done on the client-side. There's not many people working on that and the infrastructure is in need of more creative input and development resources.
That's great in theory, but then you end of with inaccessible web sites, those without Javascript are left out in the cold, and search engines won't index you. I think any framework should transparently make a site work the way you describe and as plain HTML.