> > 1.But why they didn't propose these things (HGrop etc) to W3C for better > layout. > The browsers already have something like this. It's called the table element. It works great for vertical, horiztonal and grid layout. There are some disadvantages to it compared to other layout approaches. For example, if you wanted to do your complete layout in CSS.
Adobe have been proposing things like this recently but they have some major obstacles. This is from Ted's blog post in 2006 [1]: *HTML and its success has always been tightly bound to a browser HTML/JavaScript version. Each browser embeds its logic for interpreting HTML and JS within each 5MB-30MB Download of Internet Explorer and Firefox. The only way to upgrade this logic today is to download a new browser. With Flash Player, the browser and os are completely independent resulting in the ability to run new Flash Players and applications (Flex, Flash, Breeze) in older browsers and operating systems. * > 3.Is it tough to replace Flex UIComponent with HTML5 Canvas and create a > new JavaScript framework? > There is a project called ASCanvas that is worth looking at, http://code.google.com/p/ascanvas/. From the site: *ASCanvas is an implementation of the HTML 5 Canvas element for the Flash environment, written in ActionScript.* I was able to work on the project for a short time. AS and JS are both implementations of ECMAScript. This project is structured or makes sure that your ActionScript code runs in the browser as raw JavaScript as well as a SWF. Or another way to put it, the JavaScript is compiled to a SWF. It uses Adobe's asc.jar ActionScript compiler to do syntax checking. You can even use Flash Builder to debug it. The project uses stubs for the HTML document, body and other methods. Using this you could map the display list methods to the browser document object model. [1] http://ted.onflash.org/2006/06/flex-extensibility-blink-for-flex.php
