This is a response to Bert Bos' review [1] of the Widgets 1.0 Requirements document [2].
R28. ECMAScript Compatibility COMMENT 28) (See also comment 11.) ECMAScript is a relatively well-known language among Web developers, so it makes some sense to select it as the standard widget language. On the other hand, it is far less developed than, e.g., Python, Ruby or Java. It has a well-developed library for handling HTML, but it has no file handling, no sockets, little math, no color management, no encryption and compression libraries, no forks, threads and semaphores, no time and date libraries... Does the WAF WG expect such libraries to be added (or to add them itself)?
Although those libraries would undoubtedly be tremendously useful, we have no expectation to write/spec such libraries... perhaps they are more in the domain of the WebAPI WG? Some HTML-based widgets at least have shown themselves to be quite functional without the need of such libraries. Vendors, of course, would be free to support such libraries but at the risk of incompatibility (and many already do in respect to file-IO, sockets, compression, graphic manipulation, etc). How we will consolidate such variations in programmatic functionality in the spec is still an open issue. -- Marcos Caceres http://datadriven.com.au [1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-appformats/2007Feb/0131.html [2] http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/WD-widgets-reqs-20070209/
