Observers of our commit mailing list may already have seen that there was a lot of development in a new "qx.html2" package during the last days. Most things were not even alpha at this point and could just be seen as technical evaluation and test. It was interesting for us, and meant as an early investigation, of how we could improve the usefulness of qooxdoo's richness even in simpler, more HTML/DOM oriented web sites or mini applications. It is also listed as a goal for 0.8 to bring more qooxdoo features to a lower level to improve the adaption of qooxdoo in this market.

Finally the newly created classes (especially qx.html2.Element) are the first step to replace the widget focused implementation of DOM element handling and separate it. The current implementation supports all the features previously covered by the element and display queue (both quite internal widget technology). The big news is that the new implementation of this technology is nowhere widget oriented and could be used for simple DOM manipulation needs, too.

This element class allows the user to setup styles, configure attributes and add children or HTML content. All these things happen in memory first and are applied to the elements (which are only created if they become visible) later. The whole DOM manipulation to handle children (which is quite limited) is also covered by this new implementation with a lot of additional features. Children will be appended to each other in the optimal way e.g. inner nodes first, other (visible) nodes last. (It may be the first implementation of DOM manipulation based on the ideas of Edit Distance. Thanks to Fabian for your great help here.)

There are two new documents online in our wiki which describe two of the challenges for 0.8. The first article deal with the above mentioned topic. And the other one gives an earlier preview how to work around the box model limitations of recent qooxdoo versions to make it possible to use qooxdoo applications in standard compliant documents, too.