The Inevitable

So I ran the admin panel in IE9 for a little cross-browser testing, and was horrified by the results. The empty white screen turns out to due to one extra comma on line 187, but I'll have to be back on the development system to make that fix. Netscape and Chrome don't care about the extra comma, and I really should have some some extra syntax checking going on, I just sometimes forget how contrary IE likes to be with their Java.. *cough* ECMAScript.

It's the only 'standard' that Microsoft refuses to extend and improve, and remains committed to the absolute letter of the spec. Apparently it was done out of spite, likely in the expectation that freezing in all the worst features of the language would kill it off in favor of ActiveX or .NET or whatever was out that week.

Funny story: Javascript won. And because Microsoft wouldn't let them fix the language, it remained broken, and won anyway. There's a lesson in there somewhere, but nobody agrees what it is.

It's especially funny in light of this week's kerfuffle about how much HTML5 and Javascript (I mean ECMAScript sorry) is going to be driving the user interface of the next version of Windows.

The thing very few programmers understand is Why? Why on earth would you throw away structured OO languages and IDE's for the most hostile programming environment yet created? And it's because the Browser is the most advanced User Interface toolkit ever invented. Compare HTML5/CSS3 against Swing or Silverlight or GTK or any UI framework. When it comes to that last artful few transparent pixels in the face of variable data sizes and mixed content, HTML layouts work better than anything. From the consumers point of view, this is most of the story. Prettier programs win.

So, HTML is the prettiest UI layout system, and therefore ANY language which deeply integrates with the DOM would probably be a winner. We're just lucky that Javascript has good bits, and does allow some clean design and clever code once your alter your methodologies.

This is the opposite of the way it's supposed to go. Good underlying design is supposed to bubble up to a generic interface. This other theory says it goes from the pixels in, and we programmers are forced to use 'good enough' technologies to support the animated .gifs. A bit of a blow to the pride, but if you accept it, there's a platform of billions of Javascript compilers out there, all waiting to run your code.

If you leave out the extra comma, that is.