Facebook Digs Deeper into the Black Hole of Custom Markup

urbanhonking.com

5 pointsatduskgreg2 comments

On Facebook's new custom FBML and why markup is the wrong way to implement an API.

Maybe I'm missing something but I don't see why javascript is any better than a proprietary markup language for rendering Facebook data? Either way you're tied to a proprietary platform. If you want to mock it out for your own purposes how much easier will it be to do with Javascript than FBML (I guess maybe a little bit easier)?

It would be much much much easier. Possible, in fact. Markup is the most rigid part of the system. For it to change in a useful manner means that every tool from my browser to my xhmtml parsing tools must change to adapt before I can work with it in a way that doesn't degrade my development environment. Javascript, on the other hand, is the most flexible part of the stack. It is a dynamic programming language whose behavior can be altered by inserting additional code into my particular copy of the running page.

If they switched from FBML to JS for providing that stuff, I would go from not being able to view my app at all until it is deployed to being able to stub out all of their calls to return test data (and even do interactive UI actions) so that I and my designer could see it pretty much exactly as it will look once live.

It's a huge difference.

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