What is Digg?62 Comments
- merreborn, on 10/12/2007, -0/+15It's a really lame speculative article.
New javascript versions roll out all the time. The Javascript O'reilly book sitting on my desk right now says "3rd edition: covers javascript 1.2".
We're up to 1.6 now. The web didn't blow up when JS1.3 was rolled out. Or 1.4. Or 1.5. Or 1.6. P.S.: everything in my ancient JS 1.2 book works fine still. Every new release is backward compatible.
Why is 2.0 any different?
This isn't news. This is some zdnet blogtard vying for pageviews with a sensational article. - toppgun, on 10/12/2007, -9/+23i now instinctively digg you down every time i see you.
- JAppi, on 10/12/2007, -1/+13This reads like PR from Adobe.
Why is flash the only solution? What's to say that Javascript 2.0 won't be wholely adopted by all browsers? Since when was flash ever "lightweight" ? - armbar, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8@merreborn: "blogtard" is an excellent term that I shall use from this point on. Thank you for the inspiration.
- noodlez, on 10/12/2007, -1/+9its an article about what the future will look like
- bryxal, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8Sigh maybe you should RTWFA (read the WHOLE article) before commenting...
(Just to be clear, October 17th is an arbitrary date. I have no idea when ECMA is going to release their spec.) - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6What no one has mentioned yet is that this is spam. It's a bunch of FUD about Ajax and then masturbates to how utterly awesome Flash is or something like that. Sounds like a sales pitch to me. "Ajax is gonna esplode! Use Flash, it's what the cool kids use!"
- toppgun, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5no, its more fun to digg down. :P
- merreborn, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7"Ajax has been around for less than a year"
And that, right there, is why it's obvious you don't know anything about AJAX, or this industry.
The term "AJAX" is a year old. The TECHNIQUE is far, far older:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_%28programming%29#History
I interned for a company that built an "AJAX" style web framework back in 2001. (State Software) They used iframes instead of XMLHttpRequest, but the basic concept was still there. And we weren't the only ones doing it. - zacmccormick, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4@merreborn
"We're up to 1.6 now. The web didn't blow up when JS1.3 was rolled out. Or 1.4. Or 1.5. Or 1.6. P.S.: everything in my ancient JS 1.2 book works fine still. Every new release is backward compatible."
Read the 2.0 working draft before making comments like this, they are radically changing the entire language. Full blown classes and inheritance, lexical scoping, packages, too many changes to list.
The differences among 1.3-1.6 are almost non-exsitent. A few changes in the semantics of properties and the addition of Array methods, nothing is really changed. 99% of JavaScript 1.6 code would pass as JavaScript 1.3 code with zero modifications. - noodlez, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4cliff's notes: in the future, because javascript is becoming so widely used to build applications, when the next generation of javascript comes out, a rift will develop that is similar to the CSS browser compatibility rift between IE/Firefox/Opera/etc..
- jacobmp92, on 10/12/2007, -7/+10"Then, on October 17th, 2006, something terrible happened. ECMA released the specifications for the fourth edition of ECMA Script, and JavaScript 2.0 was born."
Huh? Was this article from the future? - drzeus, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3*Widespread use* of AJAX has only been around for a year, so he's not wrong. There's a difference between one or two people trying it out years ago and everyone starting to use it right now.
- pkulak, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3That's retarded. No one's going to use a browser that breaks everything and no developer is going to program to only one browser. That's how things are kept honest.
- JorgeGT, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3nah, Dionisus sent him a disturbing spell.
- thewhitefedora, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3While this is a tad insightful. It's also a bit too extreme.
- jejones, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Well... in one respect he has a point. Based on past behavior, MS can be expected to pull an "embrace, extend, and extinguish" on Java/ECMA/whateverScript. It's to their advantage to screw over web apps that don't use technology tied to MS.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3This article is a bunch of sensationalist, speculative nonsense. I guess when your job title is "journalist" you have to turn something in every week.
- 0gre, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Yeah, that's what I thought too. If Web 2.0 means more like Flash then no thanks. The thing that's awful about Flash web pages is you have to figure them out every time you go to one. How about sticking with user interface standards so we don't have to learn how to surf the web each time we go to a new site.
- DoubtingThomas, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Jeebus!!! How many times do we have to hear is going to make webpages unusable, create famine, spawn epidemics and cause your favorite great aunt to be eaten by a grizzly bear? This crap has been going on for years. The same thing was said about CSS back in the day.
- omegaman03, on 10/12/2007, -3/+5Obviously it was written by Cybernetic Ghost Of Christmas Past From The Future
- digital1, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Articles that state "issues" with out solutions are useless.
The article should have been read like this.
On October 16 a new JavaScript specification will be release that will contain functionality that will benefit users and developers. This will affect three constituents of developers: browser, framework and application. In order to ensure that supporting the new features doesn't negatively affect the end users of AJAX based products the following thing should be done.
1.) Browsers should ensure complete backwards compatibility with the old specification. This seems obvious but backwards compatibility is always an issue.
2.) Framework and application developers should put in place functionality that allows websites to degrade to version 1.1 complaint syntax and functionality. This will stop the “Best viewer with Firefox 3.0” banners from popping up on website.
3.) ….
Then maybe throw in an nuclear bomb exploding, because everyone knows Google Maps only working Firefox 3.0 is equivalent a nuclear bomb going off in my town. - hackwrench, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2It's a standard. While hisorically there has been deviation from the standard, deviation is by no means a sure thing.
- itanshi, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2yeah, not that special. I mean, whoever makes the major websites (ie games) will dictate what browser (system) to get.
- zacmccormick, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2@snipehack
The DOM and everything involving HTML contexts are just bindings for the ECMAScript language and not to be confused with the language itself. Prototype and Scriptaculous are extensions specific to the DOM and manipulation of objects within the context of a web browser. ECMAScript is much more broad in scope than that. ECMAScript has nothing to do with the DOM and HTML elements, it just so happens that in a web browser the layout engine exposes the DOM interfaces as ECMAScript objects for you to use, along with the underlying CSS properties etc. ECMAScript can be used in completely different contexts, such as an AI scripting engine for a game possibly, or even server side scripting as a replacement to VBScript in classic ASP. Clearly HTML elements don't make sense in these cases, which is why this would never happen. You might be able to make the argument that 90 or even 99% of javascript code runs in a web browser, because that happens to be what it was invented for, but they want to preserve the possibility to embed it in other types of applications unrelated to the DOM. - merreborn, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2He's not even a journalist. He's just got a zdnet blog.
"Ryan Stewart holds an economics degree from the University of Pennsylvania and is now a Rich Internet Application developer and industry analyst. After graduating from Penn, he spent two years developing applications for the Wharton School and pushing the idea of the web as a platform for learning. Ryan now lives in Seattle with his wife and works as a developer for WorldClass Strategy while running his own consulting company, helping clients build and architect Rich Internet Applications."
They don't even pay him to write this *****. - ryanstewart, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3This isn't intended to be a "PR piece" for any company, but Flash does pass the compatibility test very well, and I think that is something that not enough people in the IT world talk about.
While you are all correct, good IT managers should be on top of change, and a most good sites will rethink their development 2-3 years out, we're in a bit of uncharted territory here. Ajax has been around for less than a year, and there are all kinds of new web applications being built around it. My point, however sensationalist it may be, is that I don't think many people have thought of the long term impact of Ajax. It's just the hot new thing that everyone wants to use. There needs to be more discussion around the pros and cons. - mourner, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Wouldn't it be easier to just block this user forever, toppgun?
- Robotsu, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2merreborn said, '"And that, right there, is why it's obvious you don't know anything about AJAX, or this industry.
The term "AJAX" is a year old. The TECHNIQUE is far, far older:"'
Actually, the term started gaining widespread use in early 2005, around January.
And as to the article itself, I have no idea what this poster is talking about, but they clearly have no idea what they are talking about. The web is the most standardized it has ever been! Seriously. I've never known a time when adhering to standards was seen as such an important part of design. - kilimangaro, on 10/12/2007, -3/+4A little bit alarmist. Ajax applications had become mainstream because they was compatible Firefox and IE
- 0gre, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1"What fool web browser developer would be idiot enough to add 'enhancements' to javascript"
As much as everyone would like to think it, Microsoft is not solely responsible for the tangled mess of browser incompatability. Netscape was just as guilty of "Enhancements" both to Javascript and to HTML itself. Only after Netscape released the code did the Mozilla foundation put a major emphasis on web standards. More recently Firefox, Safari (KHTML) and Opera all fought a hard battle to bring web standards to the forefront. One of the toughest things Mozilla had to face was breaking tons of sites designed for Netscape 4.0 because they were not standards compliant. - maize, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Yeah, Flash is hands down the best for simple multimedia looks.
But the download size of the app can multiply very quickly, and try to do anything more like access a back end database and... - 0gre, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1You must have missed the post Netscape 4.0/ pre Firefox era where Internet Explorer commanded it's highest market share and something like 15% of the internet was developed for IE only, much of it was completely unviewable to Netscape/ Mozilla users and much was just plain ugly anywhere other than IE. There are STILL plenty of IE only web apps out there. We are in a sort of Golden Age of the web where cross browser compatability is at it's height. If end USERS were to drop Firefox/ Safari/ Opera then web developers would start coding for IE only again.
- merreborn, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2"The way to make a browser popular is to make it work RIGHT"
Of course, when you dominate the browser market, you get to *define* "RIGHT". - 2Wrongs, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Personally, I've been using some of the javascript libraries and dealt with this hassle less and less. My current faves are Dojo and Prototype. Both handle a lot of these "quirks" pretty well (admittedly not perfectly).
- merreborn, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1That's the correct solution to the problem, btw. Said libraries detect the browser version, and operate appropriately. Then, as long as the library developers stay on top of compatibility issues, everyone who *uses* those libraries will be developing compatible applications.
- robweber, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2agreed.
- ascalonx, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1What fool web browser developer would be idiot enough to add 'enhancements' to javascript. Microsoft is the only one that comes to mind, but one of the biggest ideas of the IE redesign was to become more standards compliant. The way to make a browser popular is to make it work RIGHT; I think that statement has been exemplified by the beating that IE has been taking from Firefox for the past couple of years. I don't think that even MS is dumn enough to erase all their hard work on IE7 by writing in new 'enhancements' to Javascript thinking that it would gain them anything.
- armbar, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10gre, the problems in that era didn't have so much to do with Javascript as it did the DOM/DHTML models, which differed in implementation from browser to browser. You'd have a hard time finding a browser that didn't implement correct Javascript according to ECMA standards.
- zacmccormick, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Neat little article, and the author definitely presents some very real problems that browser vendors are going to have to face very soon. Brendan Eich (the creator of javascript) did a whole slide-show presentation on the future of javascript and he isn't very optimistic about what might happen as a result of the new spec.
If you are interested and want to see what he had to say:
http://developer.mozilla.org/presentations/xtech2006/javascript/
From a technology standpoint, it's a no brainer, but the JavaScript 2.0 issue is WAY more complicated than that. The web is built on javascript 1.x, and some of the changes which are basically set in stone for the 2.0 spec are certainly not backwards compatible (lexical scoping, argument checking, and many others).
For anyone who posted on this with doubts of the ramifications of the new ECMAScript standard, I urge you to look at the working draft and gaze in shock and awe at how many fundamental changes are being made to the language.
Personally, I think a radical change at this point would be for the better, we are never going to be able to bring the true desktop-like experience to the web unless we have a more robust client-side environment. The current javascript model is just about the farthest from robust out of any ubiquitous technologies. The fact that in javascript the entire object graph is attached to a single global object with no object oriented abstractions built in is proof in the pudding. There's no packaging system, there's no way to isolate a piece of javascript code, the conventions were made in such a way that every piece of javascript is blindly consumed by the interpreter and could possibly interfere with an already consumed piece of code is pretty scary, and certainly not anything resembling a robust programming model.
The only thing that makes JavaScript remotely manageable is because it's so dynamic you can do things like emulate global namespace partitioning with placeholder objects. Although these kinds of practices work most of the time, they aren't acceptable for large-scale client apps.
Years of programming have told us that classes are a good way to encapsulate and isolate functionality. Prototypial object semantics are ok for small, light-weight scripting languages (which was the requirement of yesterday's internet). Today, with Ajax on the rise, the requirements of the client environment are changing drastically.
I would think that a client-side flag for the javascript version *might* work (a la !DOCTYPE), but it would certainly present some downsides also, like interaction of new code and legacy code.
Who knows? What I do know is that I sympathize all of the engineers working on bringing this new standard to reality, you guys have some very serious challenges ahead of you! - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1No fate, but what we make
:P - Archer1980, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I also agree, way to extreme. Firstly, how many companies out there let there pages go more then a couple of years before updating them anyways? i am not sure what other developers experience is, but generally where i work, we see a 2 to 3 year rotation on websites, that is if the company doesn't go out of business or something. So backwards compatibility is not really a problem the way this guy makes it sound. Also, as an IT professional, people should be ontop of changes like this and should be able to see a change coming and have an appropriate migration plan long before "the ***** hits the fan"
I agree with a bunch of people that this definitely sounds like a PR move by the guys over at Adobe. personally i love doing small portions of sites in Flash, but hell, full out flash websites can get so frustratingly annoying unless it's done right, which most of the time it is not.
And besides, for us web programmers it's a golden age, the more they break the more we get paid. Truly a golden age **cynical laugh** - Dotnetsky, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I like "blogtard" too, and it shall forever be a part of my urban vocabulary. And, he's right.
- overcaffeinated, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1What this guy is postulating is that browser makers (or the ECMA spec drafters) will decide to break basic backwards compatibility, thus rendering a lot of code out there useless and broken. There's no possible justification provided (no, OMG BROWSER WAR!!1! is not a valid justification) and no suitable precedent cited (no, minor layout breakage doesn't count either, particularly when browser makers take such pains as providing quirks mode rendering to keep outdated page code from breaking).
This is just a troll. I'm surprised this is not coming from John Dvorak. - CaughtThinking, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Does the article go into proprietary Javascript extensions or is this just an api discussion? The whole reason Web 2.0 is even HERE is because Microsoft broke the mold to add value.
- beejay54, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1As a developer for big-brand flash projects I have to admit that there is a serious separation between flash applications and the browser and that it's a real problem. Not to mention that you're truly locked into a proprietary system and at the mercy of Adobe. Even as a Macromedia/Adobe enthusiast that makes me cringe a little bit.
Ajax/Javascript is the way to go, hands down. The browsers will grow up one day.
- aburd, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3"The browser world is more competitive than ever"
And by this the author means that there is one browser that could be argued to be truly competitive with IE? - donte, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0As a number of people have said, you get backwards compatability for free, so nothing is going to blow up. And so what if there are vendor-specific aspects of JS? If they bug you, don't use them! Besides, no worthwhile "JavaScript Engineer" is going to blindly cater to one browser without verifying that it works in others -- so if you are using vendor-specific code, that's your own damn fault. Apocalypse not, my friend.
- maxemim, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0AJAX is not a term for XML httprequest.... it is more of a change in the way we think about web apps and user behavoiur etc et c..
- champs, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0The summary:
1) The ECMA's standards for JavaScript are in flux, and the end result could be that all the whizbang JavaScripts written for "Web 2.0" apps might break because of those changes.
2) Flash also follows the ECMA standards, but promises full backward compatibility between versions.
3) This message brought to you by John Warnock. -
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