ECMAScript 4.0 Is Dead

TopSpin writes "Brendan Eich, creator of the JavaScript programming language, has announced that ECMA Technical Committee 39 has abandoned the proposed ECMAScript 4.0 language specification in favor of a more limited specification dubbed 'Harmony,' or ECMAScript 3.1. A split has existed among the members of this committee, including Adobe and Microsoft, regarding the future of what most of us know as JavaScript. Adobe had been promulgating their ActionScript 3 language as the next ECMAScript 4.0 proposal. As some point out, the split that has prevented this may be the result of Microsoft's interests. What does the future hold for Mozilla's Tamarin Project, based on Adobe's open source ActionScript virtual machine?"

Comments

Re:I'll wait for...

[JebusIsLord]

Everytime there is a 3.x in a fucking version #, some asshole thinks this joke will be funny. IT NEVER IS. Slashdot, I love you, but you are NOT COMEDIANS. STOP TRYING.

Re:Can I just point out

[Locutus]

exactly what Microsoft is doing its best work to cause. Javascript and all the tech in AJAX which allows application-like browser-neutral pages is a massive threat to Microsoft's income.

I don't know what Microsoft had to do with this but their position on any industry committee is purely to find ways to either stall the project or make sure they have ways to dilute it on Windows. They have no other reason or purpose. IMO.

LoB

Oh sweet jesus!

[FlyingGuy]

Java Script is a really bad joke. Not that there is anything better at hand, but it is utterly and completely in drastic need a of "Lift up the radiator cap, and drive a new one underneath it treatment" and damn soon.

Right along next to it, is the Document Object Model, yet another thing needing the same treatment,

.

And right along with those two is CSS, a good idea gone horribly wrong.

So what do we do? How do we fix this, how do we build something that everyone can agree on? The short answer is, more then likely we cannot. Why? Because there are to many ego's involved, to many pet languages involved, to many pet methods and styles.

But with a lot of "We are going to ram this right up your ass, everyones ass, because it will be so clean and functional you won't have a choice but to bend over and take it." attitude AND aptitude we can succeed.

The idea of DOM is great, because it creates a known method of manipulating the bits and parts of an web page to effect the best possible user experience, but the loosely coupled nature of JS, DOM and CSS just keep making the whole thing just become to overwrought with complexity and errors.

The way to fix this is IMNSHO is to rebuild it into one entity.

Wait for it......Ohhh the horor!!!!!. No kids it is not a horror, it is supremely logical. The very notion that you treat a web page as if it was a bit of paper is ludicrous! It is not a peace of paper, it is a digital screen capable of all sorts of neat tricks, and the engine that drives it is superb. The notion of paper needs to be simply left behind, move on, it was a hell of a go, but it is time to grown up, but into what?

The web browser needs to transform into a sand-boxed window manager. How is that again? A window manger, huh? The idea sits in front of ALL of you every day. The GUI desktop moves things around, arranges windows, covers them up allows them to be moved, adjusts for sizing, everything we desperately try to implement in CSS and DOM but pretty fail to do.

How do we accomplish this? Well not without a lot of yelling and screaming. But consider this, if you had the same level of control over your your web page presentation as you have over any GUI application, how happy would you be? Personally I would be ecstatic! I mean Wooooo-Whooooooo! Just think of the level of control you would have, you could build perfectly interactive web pages that would vow to your and more importantly, your audiences every whim.

As a set of verbs and nouns JS is not that bad. I would tweak it a little a little but not much. What I would do though, is make DOM ( or an equivalent name ) be derived from JS instead of having JS simply be able to connect to it, for example, a web page would begin with a call to JS ( or the equivalent name ) MyPage = NewDocument(...) and that would pop open the new page, fresh and clean. After that you start laying out the sections, eg: UpperLeft = MyPage.CreateArea(...) rinse and repeat until you have all your areas defined. At that point, you begin to fill in all the areas by making calls to UpperLeft for things like control's, backgrounds, colors, scrolling text area's and the like. At that point you could then have a successor to CSS be a value passed to UpperLeft that would then style it as you desire.

This would eliminate some of the biggest problems with CSS, ie: the box model and DIVS freeing you up to really concentrate on the content. In addition there would be a menu model in there. Trying to do menus in CSS is at best a dark art and at worst damn near impossible, depending on what you want to do. How about something like TopMenu = MyPage.New.H[V]menu which could then be fed a very small XML hierarchy ( and by the way, I HATE XML with a passion you can only imagine but in this case it makes sense ) that would populate the menu, it handles the layout of the thing, you simply provide it colors, sizes, content and the OnClick call's

But this will make web pages WAY to complicated you say