Well, I wanted to check something in the XML standard real quick over at w3, and I came across a news entry for XBL 2.0 Working Draft (Yes, it's a draft, so that means don't go busting out implementations just yet). As you can tell by the date, it came out fairly recently (about 4 days ago). So I thought, hey, it's a Friday, let's kick back and read some W3 docs (actually it was my brain collapsing trying to read the ECMA-262 standard...)! So I read on.
From what I can tell it appears to give you the ability to apply templates for nodes (I'm sure many people will love that), better event handling support, and what appears to a lingering element for preloaded data.
The template nodes appear to be considered as "shadow content", and are unavaliable to the DOM model. As templates I suppose that does make sense
Event handling seems to have improved a bit. With the ability to bind to entire elements, this prevents the grungy annoyance of having to abuse document.getElementsByTagName(). There appears to also be support for minor oddities, such as text capture events (this wasn't well described imho, but it has me wondering), key capture codes to check for, and even how many mouse clicks (double click action baby). All in all I think it ads a bit of flexibility that was previously lacking in what javascript (ECMAScript for all you purists out there
) was being given with regards to event handlers.
Preloaded data caught my attention, but it appears to be a "Hey, implement this if you want" type deal, and we all know how THAT goes!
So I'd say things are looking pretty interesting. However, as a draft we'll expect things to change, for better or for worse time will tell.
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