Microsoft, Mozilla Spar over JavaScript

[Rich Tate]

Microsoft and Mozilla don’t really see eye-to-eye when it comes to the future of JavaScript.

Much of the battle has been between Mozilla Chief Technology Officer Brendan Eich -- the creator of JavaScript -- and Microsoft Internet Explorer platform architect Chris Wilson. The two have traded barbs through their blogs over the past week.

 

[digitalfreak]

Gee, more FUD from Microsoft...

 

[eggrock]

Instead, he suggested that a completely new language be developed, because so much of the structure of the language would be changed.

Yay!!!? Seeing the structure change would be nice. I really don't like how some basic things in Javascript work.

I don't see why everyone can't come up standardized functionality and then let each add their own enhancements as necessary, and then make it simple for anyone to incorporate those enhancements if they become popular. That way the people writing webpages won't lose out quite so hard as they have historically.

 

[DanNeely]

Yay!!!? Seeing the structure change would be nice. I really don't like how some basic things in Javascript work.

I don't see why everyone can't come up standardized functionality and then let each add their own enhancements as necessary, and then make it simple for anyone to incorporate those enhancements if they become popular. That way the people writing webpages won't lose out quite so hard as they have historically.

Remember back 8 or 10 years ago, when IE vs Netscape was the great browser war? Every website except those hosted on geocities/angelfire (and even a lot of those), had an index.htm with 4 things. A 'this website always under construction' animated gif at the top. A hit counter at the bottom. And between the two 'click her for IE' and 'click here for netscape" links. The reason every designer had to do that was because IE and NS were each doing their own custom extensions, and as a result it was impossible to make a single page that worked good in both. Do you really want something that is going to increase the cross browser entropy again!?!?!?!