The whole web committee structure is why we are stuck in purgatory quagmire swamp of hell.
For example, when ECMA 4th Edition almost got legs to move JS forward but Adobe were being a bit of a political animal when it came to hedging their technical bets. Basically, at the time Adobe donated a bunch of tech to Mozilla foundation ( http://blogs.adobe.com/billmccoy/2006/11/adobe_open_sour.html) to set the stage for ActionScript to become more legitimate under the ECMA umbrella, but in doing so would have likely moved Flash deeper into the acceptance online beyond HTML. Keeping in mind Flash in 2006 was so popular that Google/Microsoft saw it as a likely threat to the web, given if everyone moved off transparent HTML and into a more encompassed tech such as a runtime like Flash, well, Google for one would have been starved of revenue oxygen (as you can't index .swf files at the time). There were a few other political issues but essentially ECMA really went into a major stall after that and its only once Flash has knifed that the actual momentum behind JavaScript picked back up again (sure it was being used despite Flash's existence but it wasn't as prolific in adoption as it is today). Like I say to many people - another word for a Flash is... a silver light, and the roadmap for Silverlight was glued on top of a briefcase that also said "Open when Flash is dead" and then inside that briefcase was a note "Now delete Silverlight". There's what you folks see on the official minutes and then there's the "beyond the curtain" corporate brand story... --- Regards, Scott Barnes http://www.riagenic.com On Wed, Nov 23, 2016 at 7:20 AM, Greg Keogh <gfke...@gmail.com> wrote: > Well, I used Hotdog >> > > [This is a Friday topic but] Good god! I remember seeing a prominent > newpaper picture back in 1996 of Steve Outtrim lounging back in his > Ferrari, purchased on the sales of HotDog HTML editor (apparently he was > too young to get insurance for a Porsche). Writing HTML was the new fad and > tech-wonder back then and there were no friendly editors around, so I can > understand how he filled a gap just at the right time, but to make millions > with that piece of amateurish VB4 piffle! ... it made me weep for humanity. > Within a year or so we had "real" products like Dreamweaver and FrontPage > which mercifully crushed Susage software into a footnote of IT history. > > Back on JS though ... I read most of the ECMA and MSDN articles on the > Javascript language reference last night as a reminder, and I forgot how > small the language is. It's technically impressive that so many complex > frameworks and products can be made from such a small language, which is a > result of its dynamic typing and half-arsed functional features. Then I > went searching for stuff like "JavasScript project structure" for good > advice on how to manage JS projects with lots of code and files, and how to > keep it modular. I soon discovered there are no "standards", just a great > variety of opinions, arguments and workarounds to deal with JS scoping > peculiarities. JS also doesn't seem to have any concept of "sets of source > files" (there is no compiler), so there is also no concept of "using" or > "include" or namespaces. So someone invents RequireJS and so on, and the JS > zoo nightmare begins. Committes are spending their lives standardising the > JS language, but the tooling and libraries have been forgotten and left to > hobbyists and students writing 2nd year Uni projects. > > *Greg K* >
