[Cosmo-dev] Getting a handle on specific UI elements

[Matthew Eernisse]

More comment inline ...

Bobby Rullo wrote:
> My point is that we will change our minds about how how granular or 
> coarse widgets should be, and id's will be sensitive to that.

That is a very good point. The UI boilerplate code right now is evolving 
pretty fast, and my suspicion is that it will settle down a bit. But one 
of the benefits of the browser-based UI is definitely its flexibility, 
so stuff does tend to be a bit fluid, even in the long term.

> Nope, it's not random at all, it's the logical path to the element on 
> the screen.
>> It sounds like y'all are talking about some kind of logical namespace 
>> that would also need to be kept up-to-date as the UI code evolves -- 
>> otherwise you eventually end up with paths to UI elements that don't 
>> really reflect what's going on in the actual UI anymore.
> 
> Yes

Cool, so it seems like you understand what I'm saying here. Anything but 
totally random strings of text kept in a spreadsheet or something would 
have to be maintained to keep in sync with the code. We would have to 
inform QA of those changes so they can keep their tests up to date.

So given that those requirements are pretty much identical to those for 
the existing JS namespace, I'm kind of dubious about the value of coming 
up with a completely separate namespacing scheme just for DOM-node ids.

It seems like the only tangible benefit is that it's decoupled from the 
JS namespace, and I wonder if that's a big enough benefit to warrant the 
extra overhead.


Matthew