IE and Ecmascript.

Taken out of context

IEBlog wrote:

In our opinion, a revolution in ECMAScript would be best done with an entirely new language

It *sounds* like, and I am drawing conclusions with incomplete data, that the IE team doesn't want to follow Ecmascript anymore, and would rather propose another language moving forward so that changes to Ecmascript don't break people's usage of JScript. I wonder what that language would be?

There is certainly an implication that ES4 is not compatible with ES3 which is patently not true.

I could have misunderstood the whole thing, and would be happy if someone could explain to me how this is improving IE and not 'breaking the web'.

Your reading of that post is the same as mine was.

Perhaps I'm not as critical, but I read it as saying that efforts to make ES4 compatible with ES3 will necessarily result in it being held back by the need for compatibility, and that it should maintain the old language without drastic changes, while switching to a clean slate for future work.

All in all, I didn't see him saying anything about Microsoft's directions here. He seemed to be speaking as an ECMA member.

Rossj wrote:

I wonder what that language would be?

VBScript?

Rossj wrote:

There is certainly an implication that ES4 is not compatible with ES3 which is patently not true.

ES4 is compatible with ES3, but whether or not it's compatible with the various spin-offs (JScript, JavaScript et al) is a whole other matter.

I can definitely see the temptation in ditching the whole thing in favour of an entirely standardised, well specified language that was free from all the issues that currently exist. Whether or not that would be an entirely wise idea is a whole other matter.

AndyC wrote:


ES4 is compatible with ES3, but whether or not it's compatible with the various spin-offs (JScript, JavaScript et al) is a whole other matter.

Well JScript isn't Ecmascript, by any stretch, so it sounds more like "We'll talk about being compatible, but we want to protect our investment in JScript at the expense of that".

I suspect the issue is more a case of "we'll never catch up, so let's have a fresh start".


I wonder whether this has anything at all to do with Adobe gifitng their ES4 implementation to the FOSS community via Mozilla?

Can't MS also implement Tamarin or whatever the project was called? Had the pleasure to see Chris Wilson speak a few weeks back and he sounded very positive towards standards but now this also comes from his fingers on the keyboard? I also am not sure that the IE team is being as open and transparent as we were once promised. I think we all deserve a clearer roadmap of where the IE team is heading and how they will possibly diverge from the standards push.

I REALLY wish that this editor would support Safari guys, it loses all my formatting and it really cr@p$ me that to have proper whitespace in my text i need to switch browsers. Surely you guys could leverage a cross browser editor.

AndyC wrote:

ES4 is compatible with ES3, but whether or not it's compatible with the various spin-offs (JScript, JavaScript et al) is a whole other matter.

I like to think of ECMAScript as being the syntax and language specifications, but the named implementations as being a bunch of added APIs and intrinstics, consider Flash's ActionScript or WScript JScript.

AndyC wrote:

I can definitely see the temptation in ditching the whole thing in favour of an entirely standardised, well specified language that was free from all the issues that currently exist. Whether or not that would be an entirely wise idea is a whole other matter.

This really should be up to the W3C IMO. The current document markup specifications allow any scripting language to be used. Why can't we just use the status-quo? Certain UAs might support additional scripting languages for specific purposes (okay, this is hypothetical, in reality this isn't the case).

Anyway I read a few blog posts and pages the other day about people wanting to add type support to EMCAScript, along with stuff featured in most other programming languages. I question the point in this, many people first got started in progrmming with Javascript, so let's keep it as simple as possible. Why do in-page scripts need strong-typing anyway? The W3C advises against pages and apps which rely on client scripting to operate, so this sort of makes it a moot point.

I did not get the impression that Microsoft wanted to replace ECMAScript with something else.

Matthew van Eerde wrote:



Custa1200 wrote: cross browser editor

How wonderfully germane

It is? Are we expecting a new release today?

Matthew van Eerde wrote:



Rossj wrote: It is? Are we expecting a new release today?

No, I meant that the wish for a cross-browser editor is fundamentally linked to the limitations of ECMAScript.

Ah I see, but it wasn't ES that was at fault when FTB was first written, it was Safari - but Safari has had support for the relevant JS for over a year now (and FTB has not been updated).

I'd be happy enough with the C9 editor if I had to type in the HTML by hand - but even that is broken, it seems like it will only take plain text and will still strip out newlines.

Dupe.

JChung2006 wrote:

There's a FreeTextBox beta out with support for Safari.  However, I would prefer to see C9 use a different HTML editor like FCKEditor.

Wow, the 2.5 beta version seems quite nice.  Even when I'm still running on IE6 at work <sigh>, but then FTB seems just as nice and it works in .NET, so which one do you think they'll choose

Matthew van Eerde wrote:

Personally I'd like to see <textarea type="text/html">  Just Work(TM) in all browsers.

No, should be an <object /> rather than <textarea /> because textarea implies text, whereas the object element can represent any arbitrary embedded resource. <object /> is the replacement for <iframe> in XHTML2.0, so maybe if there was an editable="editable" attribute to allow the content of <object /> to be edited.

Hmm, but then you'd have to add a formField="formField" attribute to mark a non-regular form element (input, etc) as a form field.

Matthew van Eerde wrote:

Personally I'd like to see <textarea type="text/html">  Just Work(TM) in all browsers.

No, should be an <object /> rather than <textarea /> because textarea implies text, whereas the object element can represent any arbitrary embedded resource. <object /> is the replacement for <iframe> in XHTML2.0, so maybe if there was an editable="editable" attribute to allow the content of <object /> to be edited.

Hmm, but then you'd have to add a formField="formField" attribute to mark a non-regular form element (input, etc) as a form field.