Agreed, but it is defined. I don't think JSON is an appropriate replacement. I'd much prefer to see it perform a recursive toString() on its members, as JSON won't give you a representation of functions and regexes and what have you.
"Add serialize() if toString is so important to keep (who uses it??)"
Browser vendors that implement window.console use it. Not that it's useful in any way. I'd like to see it as.serialize() to maintain compatibility in existing implementations.
On the console, I agree that it's necessary outside the DOM, but adding it to an ECMA standard would mean having to standardize outputs and require any implementation have an output mechanism of some sort.
"(If they ever add class definitions I'll puke.)"
I'm pretty sure it's still an anticipated actions, with the 3.1 changes being a prerequisite. Why would you puke?
"Hash Support: Javascript & JSON have typical variable naming limitations; something like this: [_\$A-Za-z][A-Za-z0-9_]+ in addition, Object has properties that are essentially reserved."
I don't know about the restrictions on Object members and don't have the time to look it up right now but I know that any object literal can take any member name so long as it's properly quoted/escaped.// This will fail: var obj = {
delete: 'foo' }// But this will not: var obj = {
'delete': 'foo' }
I don't know what you're asking for that doesn't already exist. Adding a Hash global object won't change the fact that restricted keywords are restricted. Just quote your keys if they're restricted.
"Too many OOP religious zealots out there to see this making it... I don't think one could add Functions at this point in time if they were not already built-in."
While I'm not as sensitive to adding optional semantics as some folks, I just would like a good rationale before proceeding.
"Yeah, but you weren't discussing anything with me."
Sure I was, I was discussing the context that you took your quote out of. If it wasn't you, who posted it?
"I could tell that by the lack of reference to the point I was making."
"That line" was a reference to the line you quoted.
"You were beating me over the head"
Sorry if it came across that way, it wasn't intended.
"with your disagreement with Douglas Crockford's assessment of the HTML 5 committee."
I was responding to your expressed agreement with him.
"I'm not interested, sorry."
I don't care if you're interested. If you don't want me to reply to you, post somewhere private.
"Besides, what on earth makes you think I do not see you as a specific individual? I only said I didn't want you to discuss something with me. Have more self-esteem. Believe that you stand out from the crowd. Free your inner snowflake!"
If you want to do business in a country where the laws block you from operating within your ethical framework, whatever that is, you shouldn't do business there.
Companies that exploit cheap labor in foreign markets are not ethically against doing that; if they were, they wouldn't do that.
LOL if you don't want to discuss it with me, that's your prerogative, but I was bringing up the context of what you were quoting to make a point about it in specific as relative to your post. If you don't want people to discuss something with you, then probably the best course of action is to not post on public message boards about it.
It seems the long-term answer would be DRAM-based, with a battery to help mitigate corruption on power loss. Obviously older DRAM technology hasn't gone down in price/GB, but presumably that's due in part to production going down. I'd love a boot disk using old 100 MHz DRAM chips, if it could be made dependable and as affordable as flash drives.
That line was about HTML5, which is absolutely ridiculous. The things that the WHATWG and W3C have added to the HTML5 proposal are one or both of the following: - formalized semantics already informally in use as classes and ids (like the section and nav tags); - behaviors already in use, drastically simplified (like Web Forms 2.0).
They didn't really "just make new stuff up", they're making the language and environment much more powerful, with real world use in mind. Both types of feature additions make developers' lives easier, behaviors more predictable, and creative and expected uses of HTML beyond simply parsing and displaying more possible. The HTML5 effort is downright fascinating in the amount of good in it.
"2) How about having toString() output JSON? (at least specify exactly what it should output.)"
Um, shouldn't it output a string representation of the object? Ecma-262 (ECMAScript 3) does specify exactly what it should output:
15.2.4.2 Object.prototype.toString() When the toString method is called, the following steps are taken: 1. Get the [[Class]] property of this object. 2. Compute a string value by concatenating the three strings "[object ", Result(1), and "]". 3. Return Result (2).
"Allows a function to monitor read/write/exec of an object's properties (EXTREMELY useful for client side patching of implementation bugs.)"
Why not just patch the properties/methods directly, or write an abstraction? I think the overhead of monitoring would be ridiculous.
"A Console object loosely modeled after FireBug with a focus on unit testing. Implementation optional; but no errors if its used."
I think this is better suited for the DOM.
"Perl level RegExp (look ahead)"
You had me at (?=RegExp).
"A few of the Mozilla additions"
I think most of those are in.
"Hash: an Object without ANY properties, any methods would be 'Class methods' not object methods."
Evidently the art of UI design isn't a strong point for you. Usability and good UI needn't dumb down an application.
The way I look at it is, good UI designers can produce two types of applications: easy to use and powerful, or specialized and intended for an audience that will need a UI more complex than for a general audience.
"And notice that the adoption of scripting of web pages are slow in order to allow the web pages to be useful even on older browsers."
I don't really think that's the case. The adoption was slow because it took a long time for browsers with good support for scripting and the DOM (the API the script interacts with on web pages) to become dominant. Even now, the browsers in the vast majority (IE 6 and IE 7) have terrible and buggy and slow DOM support, and the only saving grace for powerful web appsâ"even nowâ"is that there are really, brilliantly nerdy people who have taken the time to build compatibility layers like Prototype and jQuery.
"Most of the functionality in JavaScript 1.5 is sufficient for what you normally want to do."
And if it's not, extending it is not at all difficult.
"The only problem is that JavaScript/ECMAScript from a language point of view isn't really good."
Are you kidding? I think it's excellent. I don't agree on the benefits of static typing, and I find AS3 a real pain in the ass to write because of it. I know how to validate the data I'm receiving according to the standards I expect. The reason JS has been so problematic for so many people is because, like PHP, the language attracts a lot of unskilled, untrained developers. That's not a shortcoming of the language, it's just due to placement.
"What is needed in the JavaScript world is not more features, but more consistency of implementation across the various browsers."
With the exception of a few later-added methods (on Array for example), that's already there. The inconsistency is in the DOM, and that's not something ECMA covers.
It's not dead. There will eventually be a Fourth Edition of ECMAScript, it just isn't the focus now. The ES4 proposal wasn't ever enshrined as the actual Fourth Edition either.
I was really skeptical about the concessions made by the ES4 side before I listened to some of their rationale; it wasn't so much concessions to the 3.1 side, it was that the things they were dropping didn't adequately solve the problems they were put in to solve.
Point one is demonstrably true. Here, as an exercise, go read... well, pick your Mac-oriented forum. Tell me how many people you find who, say, for instance, advocate for strategies to make Apple [more] successful. That is self-identification with a corporation; and it's something that doesn't happen with very many corporations either. And it's weird in a psychological and sociological sense; here we have a corporation, which has as its interest maximization of profit. What's to identify with? Why would anyone care at all about their success except if they're stock holders?
Point two needn't even be demonstrated, it's a point Steve Jobs himself makes.
Point three is a little off the cuff remark, and while technically untrue, it ultimately raises the question of to what extent the reporting is accurate. How does Apple define research or development? How much of that does it report? Information there is vague, and it's hard to form an educated opinion on the subject unless you work within parts of Apple that get into more detail about where the money goes and comes from.
I don't know what's inflammatory about the whole thing, and I certainly didn't lie.
You're right about one thing. Apparently I got modded up more than down. I'm surprised too.
It's not a matter of a number of exploits. The number of exploits (in the wild or in theory) has very little to do with describing the relative secureness of software. Just because OS X is not a target of attacks doesn't make it secure. And its increasing marketshare will eventually lead to more attacks.
Apple, unfortunately, has not learned from Microsoft's security mistakes as much as they could. Safari, for example, has many unpatched vulnerabilities and an insecure standard configuration even where better security exists. Moreover, while Vista runs IE in a sandbox, which is ultimately its strongest security feature, OS X does not do the same for Safari; in fact, sandboxing is even available but not used!
In fact, the voters almost totally disagree with the positions of their representatives. It makes one wonder why the parties continue to have so much inertia.
It's inconceivable that such a pacifist movement could ever be organized in the context we're talking about. Even Gandhi's movement existed in a context of violent resistance.
Insofar as the election was "stolen" (not given) and significant (as in, the parties were substantially different), it's a crime that shouldn't be forgiven or forgotten.
I'm not upset about Bush stealing the election from Gore because they're both slime. But that's me. I can see how people who have interests in line with Gore would be a lot more upset than I am, and if they're consistent, they won't forgive or forget.
All of this is correct, assuming "hawk" means "openly imperially aggressive" rather than simply "imperially aggressive". Carter, for instance, wasn't really a "hawk" by the standards usually applied, but was imperially aggressive as you point out.
One might say that, as far as politicians in the Democratic and Republican parties are concerned, "dove" means "duplicitous" and "hawk" means "the enemy we know".
"Spoken like someone who hasn't been to a usability or UI design conference... ever. Apple designed UIs are the gold standard of the industry, including the OS X interface."
As a UI designer, I find this either suspect or an indication of a real lack of insight and ideas in the UI field. Apple does some, possibly most, things better than Microsoft and Gnome/KDE, but that's not saying much.
Slashdot Mirror
"toString() is not useful IMHO"
Agreed, but it is defined. I don't think JSON is an appropriate replacement. I'd much prefer to see it perform a recursive toString() on its members, as JSON won't give you a representation of functions and regexes and what have you.
"Add serialize() if toString is so important to keep (who uses it??)"
Browser vendors that implement window.console use it. Not that it's useful in any way. I'd like to see it as .serialize() to maintain compatibility in existing implementations.
On the console, I agree that it's necessary outside the DOM, but adding it to an ECMA standard would mean having to standardize outputs and require any implementation have an output mechanism of some sort.
"(If they ever add class definitions I'll puke.)"
I'm pretty sure it's still an anticipated actions, with the 3.1 changes being a prerequisite. Why would you puke?
"Hash Support:
Javascript & JSON have typical variable naming limitations; something like this:
[_\$A-Za-z][A-Za-z0-9_]+
in addition, Object has properties that are essentially reserved."
I don't know about the restrictions on Object members and don't have the time to look it up right now but I know that any object literal can take any member name so long as it's properly quoted/escaped. // This will fail: // But this will not:
var obj = {
delete: 'foo'
}
var obj = {
'delete': 'foo'
}
I don't know what you're asking for that doesn't already exist. Adding a Hash global object won't change the fact that restricted keywords are restricted. Just quote your keys if they're restricted.
"Too many OOP religious zealots out there to see this making it... I don't think one could add Functions at this point in time if they were not already built-in."
While I'm not as sensitive to adding optional semantics as some folks, I just would like a good rationale before proceeding.
"Yeah, but you weren't discussing anything with me."
Sure I was, I was discussing the context that you took your quote out of. If it wasn't you, who posted it?
"I could tell that by the lack of reference to the point I was making."
"That line" was a reference to the line you quoted.
"You were beating me over the head"
Sorry if it came across that way, it wasn't intended.
"with your disagreement with Douglas Crockford's assessment of the HTML 5 committee."
I was responding to your expressed agreement with him.
"I'm not interested, sorry."
I don't care if you're interested. If you don't want me to reply to you, post somewhere private.
"Besides, what on earth makes you think I do not see you as a specific individual? I only said I didn't want you to discuss something with me. Have more self-esteem. Believe that you stand out from the crowd. Free your inner snowflake!"
So don't post somewhere I can respond to you.
If you want to do business in a country where the laws block you from operating within your ethical framework, whatever that is, you shouldn't do business there.
Companies that exploit cheap labor in foreign markets are not ethically against doing that; if they were, they wouldn't do that.
LOL if you don't want to discuss it with me, that's your prerogative, but I was bringing up the context of what you were quoting to make a point about it in specific as relative to your post. If you don't want people to discuss something with you, then probably the best course of action is to not post on public message boards about it.
Well to be fair, and I don't remember which browsers Implement which, but the extra comma is currently invalid.
Well, okay but, eventually there needs to be a solution to turning it off without losing storage.
It seems the long-term answer would be DRAM-based, with a battery to help mitigate corruption on power loss. Obviously older DRAM technology hasn't gone down in price/GB, but presumably that's due in part to production going down. I'd love a boot disk using old 100 MHz DRAM chips, if it could be made dependable and as affordable as flash drives.
That line was about HTML5, which is absolutely ridiculous. The things that the WHATWG and W3C have added to the HTML5 proposal are one or both of the following:
- formalized semantics already informally in use as classes and ids (like the section and nav tags);
- behaviors already in use, drastically simplified (like Web Forms 2.0).
They didn't really "just make new stuff up", they're making the language and environment much more powerful, with real world use in mind. Both types of feature additions make developers' lives easier, behaviors more predictable, and creative and expected uses of HTML beyond simply parsing and displaying more possible. The HTML5 effort is downright fascinating in the amount of good in it.
I'm with you, but define "safe".
"2) How about having toString() output JSON? (at least specify exactly what it should output.)"
Um, shouldn't it output a string representation of the object? Ecma-262 (ECMAScript 3) does specify exactly what it should output:
"Allows a function to monitor read/write/exec of an object's properties (EXTREMELY useful for client side patching of implementation bugs.)"
Why not just patch the properties/methods directly, or write an abstraction? I think the overhead of monitoring would be ridiculous.
"A Console object loosely modeled after FireBug with a focus on unit testing. Implementation optional; but no errors if its used."
I think this is better suited for the DOM.
"Perl level RegExp (look ahead)"
You had me at (?=RegExp).
"A few of the Mozilla additions"
I think most of those are in.
"Hash: an Object without ANY properties, any methods would be 'Class methods' not object methods."
Why?
What parts of Javascript don't work?
Nice to see misanthropy is alive and well. :P
Evidently the art of UI design isn't a strong point for you. Usability and good UI needn't dumb down an application.
The way I look at it is, good UI designers can produce two types of applications: easy to use and powerful, or specialized and intended for an audience that will need a UI more complex than for a general audience.
"And notice that the adoption of scripting of web pages are slow in order to allow the web pages to be useful even on older browsers."
I don't really think that's the case. The adoption was slow because it took a long time for browsers with good support for scripting and the DOM (the API the script interacts with on web pages) to become dominant. Even now, the browsers in the vast majority (IE 6 and IE 7) have terrible and buggy and slow DOM support, and the only saving grace for powerful web appsâ"even nowâ"is that there are really, brilliantly nerdy people who have taken the time to build compatibility layers like Prototype and jQuery.
"Most of the functionality in JavaScript 1.5 is sufficient for what you normally want to do."
And if it's not, extending it is not at all difficult.
"The only problem is that JavaScript/ECMAScript from a language point of view isn't really good."
Are you kidding? I think it's excellent. I don't agree on the benefits of static typing, and I find AS3 a real pain in the ass to write because of it. I know how to validate the data I'm receiving according to the standards I expect. The reason JS has been so problematic for so many people is because, like PHP, the language attracts a lot of unskilled, untrained developers. That's not a shortcoming of the language, it's just due to placement.
"What is needed in the JavaScript world is not more features, but more consistency of implementation across the various browsers."
With the exception of a few later-added methods (on Array for example), that's already there. The inconsistency is in the DOM, and that's not something ECMA covers.
Why? There's consensus on Harmony.
It's not dead. There will eventually be a Fourth Edition of ECMAScript, it just isn't the focus now. The ES4 proposal wasn't ever enshrined as the actual Fourth Edition either.
I was really skeptical about the concessions made by the ES4 side before I listened to some of their rationale; it wasn't so much concessions to the 3.1 side, it was that the things they were dropping didn't adequately solve the problems they were put in to solve.
There's a great talk about it here: http://openwebpodcast.com/episode-2-brendan-eich-and-arun-ranganathan-on-ecmascript-harmony
Point one is demonstrably true. Here, as an exercise, go read... well, pick your Mac-oriented forum. Tell me how many people you find who, say, for instance, advocate for strategies to make Apple [more] successful. That is self-identification with a corporation; and it's something that doesn't happen with very many corporations either. And it's weird in a psychological and sociological sense; here we have a corporation, which has as its interest maximization of profit. What's to identify with? Why would anyone care at all about their success except if they're stock holders?
Point two needn't even be demonstrated, it's a point Steve Jobs himself makes.
Point three is a little off the cuff remark, and while technically untrue, it ultimately raises the question of to what extent the reporting is accurate. How does Apple define research or development? How much of that does it report? Information there is vague, and it's hard to form an educated opinion on the subject unless you work within parts of Apple that get into more detail about where the money goes and comes from.
I don't know what's inflammatory about the whole thing, and I certainly didn't lie.
You're right about one thing. Apparently I got modded up more than down. I'm surprised too.
It's not a matter of a number of exploits. The number of exploits (in the wild or in theory) has very little to do with describing the relative secureness of software. Just because OS X is not a target of attacks doesn't make it secure. And its increasing marketshare will eventually lead to more attacks.
Apple, unfortunately, has not learned from Microsoft's security mistakes as much as they could. Safari, for example, has many unpatched vulnerabilities and an insecure standard configuration even where better security exists. Moreover, while Vista runs IE in a sandbox, which is ultimately its strongest security feature, OS X does not do the same for Safari; in fact, sandboxing is even available but not used!
In fact, the voters almost totally disagree with the positions of their representatives. It makes one wonder why the parties continue to have so much inertia.
They would be completely impotent in a one-person-one-vote system in the US.
It's inconceivable that such a pacifist movement could ever be organized in the context we're talking about. Even Gandhi's movement existed in a context of violent resistance.
Guerilla warfare works all over the world, why wouldn't it work in the US?
Insofar as the election was "stolen" (not given) and significant (as in, the parties were substantially different), it's a crime that shouldn't be forgiven or forgotten.
I'm not upset about Bush stealing the election from Gore because they're both slime. But that's me. I can see how people who have interests in line with Gore would be a lot more upset than I am, and if they're consistent, they won't forgive or forget.
All of this is correct, assuming "hawk" means "openly imperially aggressive" rather than simply "imperially aggressive". Carter, for instance, wasn't really a "hawk" by the standards usually applied, but was imperially aggressive as you point out.
One might say that, as far as politicians in the Democratic and Republican parties are concerned, "dove" means "duplicitous" and "hawk" means "the enemy we know".
"Spoken like someone who hasn't been to a usability or UI design conference... ever. Apple designed UIs are the gold standard of the industry, including the OS X interface."
As a UI designer, I find this either suspect or an indication of a real lack of insight and ideas in the UI field. Apple does some, possibly most, things better than Microsoft and Gnome/KDE, but that's not saying much.