Draft recommendation to use Dojo

[Colin Clark]

Hi everyone,

There's been some discussion about our use of Dojo on the list recently. 
At the summit, the technical group agreed to propose the use of Dojo as 
our recommended JavaScript toolkit for building Fluid components.

I've put together a wiki page that outlines the proposal, some of the 
lingering concerns about Dojo, and a timeline for revisiting this 
recommendation. Please take a look and share your thoughts with the list.

http://wiki.fluidproject.org/display/fluid/Proposal+for+Dojo+in+Fluid

This recommendation to use Dojo covers the use of pre-built DHTML 
widgets within Fluid components, and is not exclusive. If you find a 
widget outside of Dojo and feel strongly that it's worth using, feel 
free. Just check with the community first and be prepared to do the 
extra work to make it accessible and consistent.

At the moment, DHTML and JavaScript can pose a substantial barrier to 
accessibility. With the right techniques, including use of ARIA for 
assistive technology compatibility, we can create fully accessible DHTML 
user interfaces, but it requires a lot of work. My hope is that Dojo 
will save us some time by not requiring us to implement these techniques 
in every widget we use.

On the other hand, I'm not completely bound to this approach and would 
like to continue to assess our success with Dojo's widget set. 
Unfortunately our first experience with its drag and drop library hasn't 
been particularly successful, but I still see a lot of value in trying 
to reuse Dojo widgets as much as possible to gain an accessibility 
advantage.

Thoughts? Comments? Complaints?

Colin

-- 
Colin Clark
Technical Lead, Fluid Project
Adaptive Technology Resource Centre, University of Toronto
http://fluidproject.org