Web Development Pains

Developing websites is one of the nicest ways to program, but there are still a few issues that frustrate me.

This is a list of things I'd like to see fixed, improved or added:

1. CSS Layout!
   • (or, "How to spend days on something that should take seconds")
   • Something like xul's 'flex' attribute (remember '*' from framesets; why did that disappear?)
2. Printing
   1. Page breaking is terrible (both W3C standard (2.1), and browser support)
   2. Repeating page elements
      1. Should be able to repeat headers and footers
      2. Should be able to repeat table headers (if table runs over pages)
      3. Should be able to repeat arbitrary children, if the parent node runs over pages

Javascript-specific

1. The arguments object is not an array, so things like arguments.slice don't work
2. Functors (objects that can be called like functions)
3. Handling arbitrary attribute access (like python's __getattr__, __setattr__)

Browser-specific

Mozilla

1. E4X <-> DOM connection
   1. E4X is great, but with no DOM connection it takes out some of the zing (Note: I'm aware of a workaround)
   • (On E4X: I am a little worried, though, that more data will migrate into scripts, making it harder for search engines to index)