Len asks:
>  I'm sort of fond of inner functions, at least, they 
>  don't seem to be making my life harder as an ASP 
>  relational hacker.
>  
>  Why object to them?   Just curious.

In DHTML, my general complaint was that developers used these features
to make broad changes without thinking about the object model they were
manipulating.  Most of the folks I was working with knew HTML better
than scripting, and used the innerHTML and outerHTML functions to slap
in new HTML rather than make smaller and often more useful changes - or
use CSS and CSS properties, which usually was a lot more sensible.  

Rebuilding a menu system that's been written that way is really painful;
I only did that once, but won't forget it.

In the hands of people who do know what they're doing, it's not nearly
as much of a nuisance, but I rarely see feature docs that explain all
that, including those for the innerXML function [1]. 

Right now I'm considering how to do something similar with MOE, as I'm
adding a parser, and I think I may keep the parsing and replacement
stages separate.  Less productive for some, but seems wiser to me.


[1] -
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/cpref/
html/frlrfsystemxmlxmlnodeclassinnerxmltopic.asp  (I hope there are more
and better docs, since this doesn't even make clear what happens if the
parser chokes on what it's fed.)


-------------
Simon St.Laurent - SSL is my TLA
http://simonstl.com may be my URI
http://monasticxml.org may be my ascetic URI
urn:oid:1.3.6.1.4.1.6320 is another possibility altogether

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