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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."
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.