[Gllug] css upgrade - the holy grail

[Nix]

On 28 May 2007, progga at bengalinux.org spake thusly:
> Y, this is really very confusing.  Java is now almost open-source.  There are
> now loads of open-source tools like mtasc, haxe, openlaszlo to generate Flash.
> Adobe will soon open source their Flash devel tools.  But the technologies like
> Java and Flash are not part of standards.

Language standards tend to come after a language has stopped evolving,
and languages that start as free implementations tend not to get
standardized at all, because you can always use the free implementation
so there's not so much need for other implementations, or for
cross-implementation compatibility. It's unlikely that Python will ever
be ISO-standardized, for instance, and given the unwieldy nature of the
ISO standardization process I can't really see that as a bad thing.

e.g. C wasn't standardized until 1989/1990, nearly two decades after its
invention. Neither Python nor Java are remotely that old (Perl is, but I
think any ISO standardization committee would suffer exploding head
syndrome if asked to convene to standardize *that*. ;) )

Lack of standardization is not *necessarily* a problem. What is a problem
is closed implementations combined with lack of standardization, because
then you don't have the code *or* a standard as canonical definition of
language semantics: all you have is a crude `test it and see' oracle.

>               There's that wonderful XUL that unfortunately works only in
> Mozilla.

Even XUL's own authors don't think it's wonderful.

> lost whether to use them or stick to Javascript only :-(

ECMAScript is a lovely example of why standardization doesn't
necessarily help. It has one of the least clear standards it has ever
been my displeasure to read, it doesn't standardize remotely enough to
be useful, no implementation comes very near to conformance (especially
not IE's), and it is *very* rare to find documentation (in books or
elsewhere) that explains most of the things that make it special
(e.g. its Self-like stamp-out-templates approach to `inheritance' and
all the cool things you can do with it).

SQL is another example of something that fell into the same trap, with
the added joys of non-Turing-completeness, an utterly awful syntax, and,
well, the mere presence of the dread database monster to add *another*
pile of non-standardized horror.

> Sorry for diverging to web apps from a discussion on plain websites.

Sorry for diverging to rants on language standardization from a
discussion on web apps. ;)

-- 
`On a scale of one to ten of usefulness, BBC BASIC was several points ahead
 of the competition, scoring a relatively respectable zero.' --- Peter Corlett
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