Bed time thought

[andrewducker]

Since Microsoft declared HTML is the future of web development, do you think they'll stop blocking Javascript improvements?

Comments

[robhu.livejournal.com]

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha....

[sbisson.livejournal.com]

It's a lot more complicated than the Wikipedia entry indicates - and the main reason for the delay has been the ECMA committee falling out over ActionScript and Adobe's submission of AS4 as a basis for the standard.

I've recently spoken to both the folk running Adobe's open source activities and to Chris Wilson (who's now at Google, but while at MS headed up the team running Chakra). Wilson's comments on ECMAscript 4 breaking the web are pretty accurate, as it changed major constructs, and would have required pages to have multiple script taggings for different JavaScript types (and browsers to ship with multiple JavaScript engines). Page load times and memory requirements would have ballooned and the user experience would have been terrible.

ECMAscript 4 is pretty much dead in the water at this point - even the WHATWG folk are looking more at the 3.1 branch at this point as it at least embodies some of the structures from ActionScript 4. However, ActionScript (the main reason for the delays, not MS!) is now going its own way, and Adobe has recently stated that it's withdrawn AS4 from the committee, and it won't be taking it back to ECMA for reconciliation in future.

In practice, with Adobe, Google and MS all working with the JQuery folk, I'd expect that to be the future of JavaScript...

[andrewducker]

JQuery's just a library though, not actually an advance in the language.

It's a shame, in some ways, that there aren't multiple languages used for scripting.

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

VBScript??? :-) :-)

[andrewducker]

GET IT OFF! I CAN FEEL IT BURNING!

[robhu.livejournal.com]

Can you still use VBSCRIPT in IE HTML pages?

[robhu.livejournal.com]

It's a shame that instead of JS we can't have a VM for browsers, so developers can use whatever language they want and just compile it to the opcode language used by the browser.

[andrewducker]

Yup. I'd kill to have full access to the CLR inside browsers - or even the JVM.

Hmmm, is that possible?

[robhu.livejournal.com]

I have the vague feeling there is such a thing... but whatever the proper solution might be, it needs to be something that is a standard that can be implemented without threat of patents etc in all browsers.

[andrewducker]

Aha! You can do this from applets.

Which means that you can use Java to access the DOM, and also in IE you can use Silverlight - which supports a whole bunch of languages:
http://visitmix.com/labs/gestalt/