S.Isaac Dealey posted an interesting blog entry about whether or not certain functionality should be added to the core CFML language. He was talking specifically about the ability to work with zip compressed archives but the argument applies to many other things.

His assertion is that since a lot of functionality can be easily added through the use of ColdFusion extensibility options–User Defined Functions, Custom Tags, and ColdFusion Components–and because of this some common functionality does not need to be added to the core CFML language or function library.

I completely agree that developers should take full advantage of extensibility and the great resources available to us such as cflib.org and Macromedia Exchange. With these options individuals can add functionality to CF and share that functionality with others.

However, I disagree that this replaces the need for new functionality to be added to the core language for several reasons.
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We purchased a copy of Windows-Eyes from GW Micro to see exactly how well some of our government sites worked with a screen reader.

So we received the software in the mail with a CD and approximately 150 page manual. Turned out this nice accessibility software has a little accessibility issue of it’s own. All 150 pages of the manual were blank. No text. Just lots of little bumps on all the pages.

Anyone read braille?

I wrote a DisplayInColumns custom tag recently for a project and have found it to be extremely useful. The tag minimally accepts as parameters a query and a formatter and optionally includes the number of columns and table attributes. The formatter is a UDF that is called to format each record in the query–referred to as a callback.

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