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by loewenskind 5782 days ago
This is my biggest gripe about HTML5. They had the chance to really fix a lot of missteps but they made the (IMO) horrible mistake of using JavaScript as their "assembly language". Regardless of what anyone thinks about JavaScript, not everyone is going to want to program with it. Many of us will be programming in something else and compile to the base browser language.

What should have happened is that they just define a (high level) VM that we can all compile to. The browsers could have certain languages they compile to this VM language their self (e.g. JavaScribt, VBScript, etc.) and the rest of us compile to a binary file and point to that in our HTML page (e.g. <code type="vm" location="code/main.hvm"/>)
1 comments
nanairo 5782 days ago
Oh dear... on paper great, but can you imagine how long it would have taken them to come to a standard? I think HTML5 is already a bit on the side of being a step too wide, but I guess we've been stuck in HTML4 (and related technologies) for so long that it was necessary. XHTML 2 was an awesome language, imho... just another case of too much meat on the fire, and so never reaching a conclusion.

Let's get a good HTML5 system now, and then we can think of adding additional scripting languages. The best is the enemy of the good. :)

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loewenskind 5782 days ago
>Oh dear... on paper great, but can you imagine how long it would have taken them to come to a standard?

I don't think it would have to take too long. One browser could do it and then the others could copy it. Further, the standard could be general until it's worked out more.

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