[ILUG] [A little OT] the OpenIreland response to Minister Hanafin

[Colm MacCarthaigh]

On Thu, May 06, 2004 at 10:52:54AM +0100, John Allman wrote:
> Although i'm sure your piano thing worked a charm, i don't believe it's 
> possible to write code that will work for every browser in every 
> situation. Things like workarounds for buggy css implementations can be 
> troublesome when you're doing nasty things with layers. I've written 
> code that does no silly checks and works, but i dont believe that's 
> possible for everything you want to do in javascript atm. So i guess i'd 
> argue that that day is yet to come.

That's quite different from wanting to be able to write any ammount of
Javascript and feel confident it will work. Yes there are things that
only work in certain browsers, jscript contains a ton of IE-only
extentsions and there are other aspects which are broken .. but the
solution is to design around them, not use them and to find alternate
solutions. 

With any client-side embedded scripting language, you're never going to
be able to do "everything you want" convienently ...  but the notion
that writing something in Javascript means you will inevitably have to
do deal with cross-platform bugs is a fallacy.  It's fully possible to
write portable, working, Javascript. It's simply a matter of knowing the
standards and knowing what is portable.

Interestingly, with the advent of the Javascript 1.2 standard it
actually became provably possible to do pretty much anything in
Javascript. Since 1) the core of the language is Turing-complete 2) it's
possible to divide the browser-window into a 1 pixel granularity matrix
of rollover images and 3) it's possible to trap input,  the only limit
on what you can do is the amount of memory and CPU available to you. In
theory, you could write and display an entire Operating system in fully
portable Javascript. Though obviously here I'm being deliberately
ridiculous.

All the same it's a pity that Javascript is such a neglected language.
It is actually quite elegant and has one of the best truly
object-oriented models out there, extended right out to functions as
objects;

 var square = new Function("number", "return number * number;");

Which is surprising for a "toy" language.

-- 
Colm MacCárthaigh                        Public Key: colm+pgp at stdlib.net