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MS, Mozilla Clashing Over JavaScript Update
jfruhlinger writes "JavaScript has become a crucial part of Websites built on AJAX underpinnings, which makes the upcoming revision to the ECMAScript standard crucial for the future of the Web. But in today's browser environment, no one vendor can impose an update path — which may set things up for a nasty conflict. A fight is being fought on blogs between Mozilla Chief Technology Officer (and creator of JavaScript) Brendan Eich, who wants to the new ECMAScript standard to be a radical upgrade, and Chris Wilson, architect of MS's IE team, who would rather keep JavaScript as is and put new functionality into a brand-new language."
Maybe this is a naive question, but why isn't a third-party standards organization leading the way on this? I know that W3C didn't do a great job standardizing HTML (as any web developer who has spent hours debugging IE vs Mozilla can attest), but ANY standard is better than no standard here. Where's NIST or ANSI? I hate to even suggest that the US government get involved, but setting some kind of standard could avoid another Blu-Ray vs. HD DVD wasteful standard war that hurts consumers and developers. Everyone would be better off if this conflict could be avoided entirely. What would it take?
Yeah, design by commitee always works out so well! Seriously, third party standards bodies are only good at post-facto. Don't rely on them to innovate. I say IE and Mozilla battle it out, release the product, and may the best man win. Once a winner is reasonably clear, then the standards bodies can get in and write it in stone.
Opera's Haarvard suggests that it's about Silverlight, and Microsoft trying to close the web. Mozilla, Opera and others are pushing to extend open web technologies, but Microsoft is saying, wait, the web doesn't need to be extended at all! Well, except with Silverlight and WPF...
If they're serious about turning the browser into an application platform, there needs to be a multithreaded language with full DOM access, whether that is Javascript or something else. An application where the UI stalls the processing or the other way around is just not acceptable. Since Javascript multithreading has been rejected before, because it's supposedly too difficult for the typical script author, I suspect that Microsoft may have the right instinct here to go with a separate language for "pros", keeping Javascript simple for things like mouse rollovers and other eye candy.
ECMA International is a group that writes standards.
By the time that a good chunk of all browsers actually support ECMA 4, it's going to be a "nice to have" feature that nobody's going to be too keen on.
The road forward, in true hacker fashion, is probably to write translators so that part of your PHP, Ruby, Perl, Java, or C# code magically runs on the client, treating ECMA 3 as a vague intermediate language.
ECMA 3 can be the x86 assembly language of teh intarweb. No CPU actually executes real x86 instructions anymore, they translate it into internal RISC/VLIW-ish operations. Very few programmers write much of any raw x86 instructions anymore.
Of course, this may or may not be handy for the other ECMAScript implementations like LiveScript.
Gentoo Sucks
There needs to be a third pary arbitrator here.
And hopefully that arbitrator tells them all to just STFU up and use python
NewslilySocial News. No lolcats allowed.
As a user, I really couldn't care less which way it goes.
Just don't break things that work now!
As a developer, I really don't care, either.
Just don't break things that work now!
OK, maybe I'm missing the point here but AFAICS no-one's arguing against the new draft; instead, the argument about whether you accept the new syntax inside tags or not. One side says yes, other says we should keep that for older JS and put the new stuff inside tags or similar so we can tell ahead of time which one we're supposed to be dealing with and make sure we don't break existing web code.
I don't see anything about closing the web or stomping on the little guy or anything like that. Where's that coming from?
I know it's somewhat indicative of a tinfoil hat, but that's basically what I and many others do, using NoScript.
If I trust the website enough to run javascript, then I add it to my whitelist. I don't see the need for javascript on most of the pages I go to, and would rather not have my computer running unnecessary code. Seems to my totally uneducated POV that it'd slow my computer down if I have 20 tabs each running javascript stuff, when only 2 of them ACTUALLY need it. My RAM is precious to me. =(
There's no need to pull Ron Paul's abysmal ability to properly render real world websites into the discussion.
Well that's what GWT, OpenLazlo et al do already anyway. The thing is you can't get all the features of the underlying language that way. The key is to making the source language so much better than Javascript that my complaint sounds like saying "the problem with C++ is that you can't get all the features of assembly." (And I mean within the source language, not with things like asm blocks.)
Personally I like Javascript as a language and think it's a shame to see roadblocks to it's development happen because of the nature of the platform it usually runs on. I'd like to see something like GWT where the source language is Javascript instead of Java - that is a Javascript to Javascript compiler where you could add whatever local features you need and have the compiler throw away the fluff and stick in cross-browser compatible shims.
more of the same on Twitter.
Screw two languages. I'd love to have one language that actually works on all the browsers. Javascript as it's implemented by Microsoft is worlds different from any implementation outside of it. It's only by hacking together the common bits between the implementations that web pages are actually capable of working on multiple browsers.
Star Pirates
The trouble is, Microsoft has a point. Original HTML, up to, say HTML 3.1, was limited but a reasonable design. Most of the attempts to extend past that point have been disappointing. CSS is a collection of attributes in search of an architecture. Page layout with "float" and "clear" is too limited and doesn't work well. (The "three column problem" is well known, and workarounds using layers or absolute positioning often result in text on top of other text.) Javascript is a mediocre language. (Could have been worse; see TCL.) That's the current mess.
Papering over the problem with a layer of "toolkits" just resulted in a proliferation of incompatible toolkit layers. That wasn't the solution.
But Microsoft will try to "fix" the problem with a closed, ambiguous system that requires frequent updates. That's what they do with everything else.
I don't see a good way out of this. Who can provide leadership? Adobe? They can't even make Dreamweaver work right any more.
Javascript is intentionally designed to be less functional than any of the languages you've mentioned, and with good reason...A client side language with the sort of feature set that perl or ruby or python has would be death on a plate in the context of a modern web browser; you'd go to a webpage and it wouldn't just slip you a trojan--it'd reinstall your OS.
Client side languages need to be concerned purely with the cosmetics of the interface. Any single step beyond that opens up some extremely scary security concerns.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
And that is exactly what ECMA 4 does: it leaves ECMA 3 as it is (except for a few really minor and obviously broken things that everyone except for Microsoft agrees on), and then adds some sorely needed extras on top of it which the open web really needs in order to stay competitive with the closed-offerings by the likes of Microsoft.
All current-day JavaScript will continue to work! Backward compatibility has been the number one goal during the development of ECMAScript 4. But Microsoft is scared - web applications have finally started fulfilling the original promise shown by Netscape, making the OS largely irrelevant. And so Microsoft is throwing up any- and all roadblocks it can think of, stalling for as much time as possible in order to create enough lock-in with WPF e.a. that they'll remain relevant. Understandable, of course - they're a company, trying to survive. But a really bad thing for the open web, and something which must be overcome.
I think Microsoft royally screwed up with outlook web access. They added XMLHttpRequest to the browser so outlook web access would work more like a desktop app. They built an application on a technology that did not require full access to the latest version of the win32 api and x86 assembly language and it was off to the races. Most of Google, Yahoo and indeed the entirety of Web 2.0 was built on this mistake. They are desperately trying to put the web back in the original box they intended it to be in which is people without access to the latest version of the full Win32 API, and an X86 processor will be denied access to all online content.
So you think that while right now we have partial and buggy implementations of one scripting language in most browsers, when we have two new additional scripting languages we'll have two well-supported, to-the-spec implementations of the two new languages in most browsers?
The overview of the current ES4 proposal is here: http://www.ecmascript.org/es4/spec/overview.pdf
Go check it out and decide for yourself.
Because HTML and javascript
- have know been widely field tested, their strenght and shortcomings are known, there are hundreds of implementation of them that have been heavily tested and debugged, this is extremely precious
- it is widely adopted, switching represents a huge cost for the whole industry (not only it pro but all the people in the world who live by selling html developpement)
While starting from scratch looks pleasant, for big things (and html is *big*) gradual changes are more appropriate.
\u262D = \u5350
My guess is Microsoft realise that compatibility with JavaScript, HTML and other open standards is questionable in most browsers and they absolutely do not want to make it any better. After all, if the open standards were adhered to (and improved such as with ES4), who would care about Silverlight or .NET? I think that's the bottom line here. ES4 makes many fundamental improvements to JavaScript. It's not hard to think that ES4 + HTML + a strong Ajax lib might render Silverlight irrelevant. And Microsoft sure can't let that happen. Better to talk up problems in js and subvert every effort to improve. Meanwhile they'll push Silverlight as the solution to all the problems they're partly responsible for. The sad part is that Flex and venerable Java are still better solutions than Silverlight but we know how the industry loves the next best thing even if there is no need to.
And hopefully that arbitrator tells them all to just STFU up and use python :).
Yes, a language that parses whitespace like Python does would be great for client-side scripts run from a web browser.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
Purely for syntactical reasons. At the risk of ticking somebody off, I really dislike VB's syntax.
Javascript is in no way comparable to XUL. XUL is an XML layout dialect, JS is a programming language.
Also "Tacking on updates to existing standards only creates ugly security loopholes, and all sort of weird hacks."?
Yeah, that explains why Python 2.x is so much worse than Python 1.x and Perl 5 is so much worse than 4 and why the new versions of C, C++, C# and Java never caught on... Oh, wait.
Climate Progress - Hell and High Water
Your criticisms seem to be aimed at HTML and CSS, and at attempts to make up for their failings with Javascript toolkits. What Mozilla is pushing here is significant enhancement to Javascript in order to remedy many of its failings while maintaining backward compatibility. Microsoft, on the other hand, is trying to limit changes to the language. According to Eich, Microsoft is criticizing the ES4 proposal without offering concrete alternatives. Instead, he says, they are developing their own language in secret.
I think Javascript's a pretty good language. Certainly it's not perfect - few languages are. PHP, C++ and Perl spring to mind as being particularly flawed, but they have been indispensable nonetheless. Javascript has a huge installed base of runtimes and many programmers are familiar with it (so there's lots of bad code, which may be why JS has such a bad rep). We know how conservative most developers are about learning new languages (especially ones that don't look like C or BASIC), so there would be a significant cost and risk to trying to switch horses from Javascript to something else. Browser compatibility is another matter altogether - but we know who is causing the trouble there.
Javascript is practical and flexible; the main problems I have encountered are weak support for OO and larger projects - problems the ES4 effort appears to be trying to address. Microsoft's argument is for making minimal changes in favor of some unknown future language. If they really are working on that language in secret, and are able to complete it while Javascript is mired in controversy, the outcome is unlikely to be good for the rest of us.
That's exactly it. Some people are fond of saying "You know, it was actually Microsoft who invented AJAX because they had XmlHttpRequest() first" but if Microsoft had known that they'd be enabling a general-purpose platform for application delivery -- one that doesn't require Win32, or even a full desktop computer at all -- they'd have found another way or not done it at all.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
I agree with you, except for the Python part. Python is an ill fit for a language that's meant to be embedded in a (X)HTML, because (X)HTML does not honor content whitespace (and neither to a lot of related tools) and Python relies on whitespace for structure.
I could see trying to standardize a subset of Ruby though. Drop some of the ambiguous (or more difficult to implement parts) and access to operating system services (like fork(), etc), just keep the very basics necessary for pure code and modular OO, give it a well-though-out built-in object model for the DOM (and perhaps some built-in libraries of functionality for things like XML/XSLT, xmlHttpRequest-like stuff, etc), and keep the language compatible back to real Ruby (that is to say, all BrowserRuby code runs on a real Ruby interpreter, but not vice-versa).
Re-reading the above, it sounds like I'm basically describing a rehash of what the Javascript guys did. The difference would be that (1) We can do a better job today now that the problem domain is better understood, (2) It will actually be compatible (javascript code does not run in a real java environment unfortunately), and (3) It will be based on a much better language (no offense, but Java sucks).
Normally I advocate Perl over Ruby, but in this context Ruby probably makes more sense (in the very broadest sense, the languages are fairly comparable anyways).
11*43+456^2
Actually, I wrote a function for an application I'm developing (in Python) that fixes that problem to some degree with XML files. Example:
:)
<script type="text/python">
from template import *
who='Slashdot'
if not (who == ""):
s=Template('Hello, $n!').substitute(n=who)
else:
print "I'm confused!"
print s
</script>
will cause problems, since XML parsers tend to include all the whitespace and newlines and so forth. My function simply converts the tabs to spaces and then unindents everything deleting the number of leading spaces of the first line, which will never be indented in a valid Python script, from all the lines of the script.
Probably not something that hasn't been done before, but I did come up with it all by myself.
My blog
Firstly, at the time there were a huge range of "safe-for-scripting" ActiveX objects that could be created in IE. This was Microsoft's way of clutching every corporate shop that dared to use one in a death grip, instantly destroying their potential to have the versatility that a web application would normally bring. XmlHttp, found in the MSXML library, was just another safe-for-scripting object. At the time the web curious were already exploring a number of ways to do asynchronous calls, most commonly being hidden IFRAME updates, but there were a myriad of other options, including plenty of third-party XmlHttp type components, and even some Java Applet techniques for doing this.
This was a hugely growing need, and while Netscape was beaten to the ground and slowly regrouping Microsoft seemed to lead by default.
The point, I suppose, is that the invention of "AJAX" was absolutely, positively inevitable. Microsoft's influence in those early days is entirely the result of its monopoly, not its technical leadership.
[...]
Syntax
Some identifiers that were legal names in ES3 (let, yield, cast, is, and a few more) are keywords in ES4. Other keywords in ES4 were future reserved words in ES3, and correct ES3 programs do not use them (class, interface, public, private, and many others), though some implementations allow them to be used as names. Sometimes the new keywords are contextual and can continue to be used as names, but in general an ES4 implementation that must be able to process all ES3 programs must be told which dialect--ES3 or ES4--it is looking at, so that it knows whether to treat these identifiers as keywords or not.
The mechanism that supplies the dialect information will depend on the environment. In a web browser the information comes from the MIME type of the script or from a version parameter on the SCRIPT tag in the document. New web pages that choose to use ES4 will have to specify the dialect. So unless you specify that some script block is actually version 4 ES4 interpreters are supposed to treat it as version 3 code.
np: Savath & Savalas - Tormenta De La Flor (Golden Pollen)
"I'm not anti-anything, I'm anti-everything, it fits better." - Sole
Yes you can make browser updates mandatory, by simply refusing to support the old ones. ( all hail Cthulhu )
You know the same way Apple and Microsoft force you to get new computers if you want to run the "New And Improved With 25% Fewer(?) Gaping Security Holes Operating System"
But that would require organizing developers into some form of union.
You seem to be under the impression that JavaScript has some relationship to Java. It doesn't.
From the Wikipedia Javascript page:
"Despite the name, JavaScript is essentially unrelated to the Java programming language; though both have a common debt to C syntax. The language was renamed from LiveScript in a co-marketing deal between Netscape and Sun in exchange for Netscape bundling Sun's Java runtime with their browser, which was dominant at the time. The key design principles within JavaScript are inherited from the Self programming language."
Yes, I'm too lazy to find a better source.
Have you ever, honestly, been to a website that freezes Firefox?
Yes, I have. There's a dating/forums site called plentyoffish that regularly freezes Firefox for me (at least as of 2.0.0.8). Sometimes the browser recovers quickly, sometimes it recovers slowly, sometimes I give up waiting and kill it.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
There are some issues I have with the fact that there's no simple way for users to set trusted zone and Firefox security tends to throw the baby out with the bath water as far as security goes(no modal windows, no clipboard modification etc, I know why this is the case, but sometimes folks like me have legitimate reasons for these sorts of things). I'm also a bit annoyed with the whole "we'll fix it in 3.0" thing that's going on right now, but that's another story.
This all sounds like a wonderful story for the Mozilla corp, but it's not. While the bundling didn't help, Netscape got beaten by IE because IE was better. It's not now, but that's mostly because Microsoft have been slack bastards and sat on it for years.
I remember the browser wars well. I wasn't on the web for mosaic, but I was on for the browser wars. I know that having bundled IE got a lot of people on the net who wouldn't have otherwise gotten there, and I know that Netscape got bundled by ISPs for a while too. Netscape 4 was a great browser, it was better than IE 4, when I had to choose between those two, I used Netscape. However, Netscape 4 wasn't better than IE 5, and by extension it wasn't better than IE 6.
After Netscape 4 there was pretty much nothing for a number of years. Netscape 6 was an abomination, an unfinished rendering agent(gecko is great now but it wasn't done then). Opera was and is a great browser, probably the greatest browser of that time(might still be haven't played with it in a while) most of the innovations of the new era of browsers came from Opera, but it never caught on. Partly that was because in order to be faster it gave up on all the terrible web kludges and large chucks of the web in those days was terrible kludges. It could also be its linux reliance on QT which was bad back then, or the cost, who knows. You want to find a case for why a good browser failed, look at Opera, but back then Netscape wasn't in it and Mozilla wasn't done.
As for the reason why there are standards out there that nobody complies with, it's because the standards suck.
Is there a non-elitist reason to not use tables for a layout?
There are many. Let's try a few:
Is that good for a starter? I'm about out of time to spend on this...
I don't think that browser support for tableless layout is perfect. It's awful in older browsers, but getting better all the time.
In any case, it's the browser's job to render the standard properly, not yours to break the code for the browser. I find the middle-ground is to keep the layout pretty basic to get broadest browser support, and tolerate browser differences. I'd never promise pixel-for-pixel cross-browser support. HTML isn't designed to do that.