The Need for Domain-Specific Languages

But, being a general purpose language, many users find JavaScript too intimidating even for trivial tasks such as validating a field. Besides, heavy use of scripting language makes HTML pages less maintainable and relatively trivial changes require considerable human effort. A simple change like considering discount field in a purchase order form, as mentioned earlier, involves a clear understanding of the scripts that handle code for form field validation and scripts that handle code for interaction among the various form widgets. Many specialised libraries exist [27] but they still expose the user to a full programming language. Thus, high-level domain-specific languages, that can handle each of these tasks separately, are very much desirable. W3C working draft [3] on extending forms has stated this objective as:

"It should be possible to define rich forms, including validations, dependencies, and basic calculations without the use of a scripting language."