Is the idea that you build your website out of the blocks of other websites?
As in TMZ and Techcrunch both publish something and you display their little blocks on your website? Is the data dynamic? It seems like there is data, and there is a block that can display said data.
How is this any different from a view and a model(+controller?)?
The idea is more that you build your website out of blocks which allow the display or editing of defined data structures - so you search for blocks which are compatible with the data you want to work with (which can be done programmatically), and swap them around depending on what the user wants to do (display x, edit y).
The goal is that blocks can be dropped into applications to provide the functionality to display x or edit y, without requiring configuration, because the operations they will use to work with data, and the ways in which constraints/valid data are described, are common across all blocks and supporting applications.
For the case of a football website, you could have blocks which display or edit data which doesn't need to be tied to football specifically, but can be used to build/display the football website, e.g. (I'm just going to say 'display' but assume these can all 'edit' the same data):
- an 'Organization' block that displays an org name, logo, HQ location, etc (for displaying info on teams)
- a 'Table' block that takes any dataset and can allow you to sort, filter, the data in it (for displaying stats)
- an 'EventCalendar' block that takes a list of fixture dates and details, maybe allows you to view it as a list or on a calendar
these blocks wouldn't care that you were using them for football specifically - just that you were providing them data in the structure they can work with. We're not claiming that these generic blocks would do everything you wanted - but they'd get you a lot of the way there.
As in TMZ and Techcrunch both publish something and you display their little blocks on your website? Is the data dynamic? It seems like there is data, and there is a block that can display said data.
How is this any different from a view and a model(+controller?)?