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On Fri, Jul 17, 2009 at 01:46:55PM +0100, tom wrote: > >> In My ideal world we'd have had an Object Oriented JavaScript with JIT > >> for the browser and compiler for system side to link in client side > >> stuff in a standards compliant way - through mime types for video etc. > >> I'd also like the same JS engine for sever side on apache (for me) so I > >> could stick to one language for programming, and one operating system > >> (i.e. no VM's) for doing 'other' work. > >> > > > > Not really feasible, as you want a limited environment for the > > client-side language (otherwise you end up with braindamage like > > ActiveX), and on the server-side you want it to be somewhat less limited > > (being able to access files, for example, would be useful). I’m not > > saying that you shouldn’t use the same language, just not necessarily > > the same engine. > > > I think you really mean its a security issue - you run ANY 'plugin' you > have the same issues as with activex: anything the browser runs is > suspect and has the permissions of the browser (think corrupt jpg)- > again these are better properly sorted at standards level if possible > and in sandpits otherwise. But what I meant to say was if someone offers > me a flash video stream I want to be able to play it through my choice > of (web standard capable) videoplayer and not be forced to > install/upgrade flash or mess about trying to fool the page into playing > through mplayer of something which always fails on the next site..... Well, yes, it’s a security issue. There’s a difference, though, between corrupt images which exploit browser bugs, and programming languages that get executed in the browser. My point was, though, that javascript in the browser absolutely has to be run in a sandbox; anything else is just insane. Server-side languages, however, need some more permissions to be useful, so running them in a sandbox may not be feasible. This is more of an implementation issue than a standards issue, though, I think. You’re right, though, that standards-based video streams would be better than proprietary flash widgets, and would allow the user to choose their own player at will. Of course, most vendors won’t go for that, since if an end user can play it in any software they like, they can copy it and so on too. The proprietary players allow some modicum of control over that, in theory. On the other hand, in my ideal world, the web would be entirely made up of valid XHTML with semantic metadata, as little javascript and CSS as possible (degrading gracefully where unavailable), images only where necessary and only where they add to the text, not for aesthetic reasons, and video and audio even rarer. > JS is a bad language - it could (still) be a really great language - go > see what MS and Adobe killed off! You can run JS in apache - someone's > done it, but it needs a few extensions to make it useful at this level - > see above... JS has nice features, but even if you get rid of the dodgy implementations and ancient versions, it’s still not as nice to code in as Python, for example. That’s just my opinion, of course. The big issue for me is that a lot of the really nice features in recent Firefox releases are unusable in practice, because Internet Explorer doesn’t support them yet; it’ll be years before versions of IE that don’t support them are rare enough to be discounted. -- Benjamin M. A’Lee || mail: bma@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx web: http://bma.subvert.org.uk/ || gpg: 0x166891C7 “Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all.” — Hypatia of Alexandria
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