Scripting

re: Scripting

Lachlan Hunt — Sun, 06 Mar 2005 09:01:00 GMT

Scott wrote:
"I want to see Microsoft retake the lost market share to FireFox."

If that ever happens, then IE's development would just become stagnant again (meaning they will have no reason to implement the standards), as it has been for the last 4 years. You seem to be forgetting that the reason IE7 is coming out (though, MS will probably deny this) is because of the competition Firefox and other browsers have brought back.

I for one want to see IE lose this monopolistic market share, regardless of any standards support they'll be implementing. Maybe once the playing field is level again, we'll see some real IE development happen!

Garbage Collection

Jay — Sat, 05 Mar 2005 14:13:00 GMT

Any chance to look at garbage collection (or explain the current implementation)?

DOM, DHTML, XMLHttpRequest etc. are getting more popular / mature, leading to pages that don't get reloaded so often - hence effective GC is more important.

There's some commentary on "The Internet Explorer Memory Leak Problem": http://jibbering.com/faq/faq_notes/closures.html#clMem and more here: http://www.dotvoid.com/view.php?id=23

Suggests IE uses reference counting for GC. Mozilla seems to have a more advanced GC mechanism now, using mark and sweep. Some notes http://jpspan.sourceforge.net/wiki/doku.php?id=javascript:gc

Thanks

re: Scripting

Scott — Fri, 04 Mar 2005 20:54:00 GMT

I would like to add my voice to those of Ken Kolano and the others who have expressed distaste for retaining the language attribute for the script tag.

It's very important for IE7 to support all current W3C recommendations FULLY. This includes fixing IE6 bugs, as well as eradicating proprietary stuff. I want to see Microsoft retake the lost market share to FireFox.

re: Scripting

Jim — Fri, 04 Mar 2005 18:38:00 GMT

Ken,

Technically the DOM and event handlers are not part of the language. They are language independent APIs provided by the host.

No matter how big the differences are in the DOM and event handlers, it doesn't amount to a change in the language.

For instance, JScript in Internet Explorer and JScript in IIS/ASP are exactly the same language, but the objects exposed by the host are different - you don't get Server or Session objects in Internet Explorer, for example.

This doesn't mean there aren't actual differences between Javascript and JScript; I mentioned a couple above, and I agree with your basic point.

re: Scripting

Jim — Fri, 04 Mar 2005 18:27:00 GMT

That's interesting, Anne. Have they allowed document.write as well? Last I checked, people were complaining that this wasn't possible because you could introduce malformed XML that way (something I don't particularly agree with; the document.write/innerHTML could always raise an exception if that happened).

re: Scripting

Anne — Fri, 04 Mar 2005 18:19:00 GMT

In fact, innerHTML is now supported for XHTML documents in Mozilla. (That is correct, XHTML documents send as application/xhtml+xml.)

re: Scripting

Ken Kolano — Fri, 04 Mar 2005 17:18:00 GMT

Also the comment on ECMAScript, JavaScript, and JScript being the same language is not accurate.

JScript and Javascript are both supersets of ECMAScript, which though supporting the full ECMA Script specification introduce additional DOM and proprietary functionalty.

I wish JScript and JavaScript were the same language, then I could stop having to code seperate event handlers for each. Of course that would require IE to support the DOM Events spec properly, which it doesn't.

re: Scripting

Ken Kolano — Fri, 04 Mar 2005 17:13:00 GMT

Sigh. This language attribute thing really pisses me off. Bill said MS would now be commiting itself to better supporting standards, but here you go giving examples that are directly counter to them.

Language was deprecated as of HTML 4.0 (released 24-Apr-1998), there have been 3 HTML/XHTML releases since then that include the <script> tag (HTML 4.01, XHTML 1.0, and XHTML 1.1), the last of which has removed the langauge attribute completely.

If you can't even produce examples here that comply with a 7 year old standard what hope is there that you'll ever code a browser that will.

Blah.

re: Scripting

FlorentG — Fri, 04 Mar 2005 14:16:00 GMT

Yeah, replace <SCRIPT language="VBScript" > with <script type="text/vbscript"> ;)

re: Scripting

Jim — Fri, 04 Mar 2005 11:57:00 GMT

> In fact JScript, JavaScript and EcmaScript are all basically the same language with a different name.

Does JScript support Javascript language features such as catchguards and function expression statements that do not appear in the ECMA-262 specification?

I think that saying they are "basically the same language" is a bit of an oversimplification. Javascript and JScript both implement the ECMA-262 specification, but the three entities are not identical.

> However as no other browser implement this or implement multiple scripting languages at this time we will be concentrating on other more pressing issues with our support for standards in the foreseeable future.

I understand & agree totally.

> what about (somehow) phasing out support for useless proprietary extensions like document.all, innerHTML

I agree with Chris, I wouldn't describe innerHTML as being useless. Adding content to the page via createElement etc. takes quite a bit of code compared with innerHTML. I don't think that innerHTML should be dropped from Internet Explorer until after it supports DOM3LS.

Something I'd love to see (but doubt it'll happen) is an annotated copy of each specification that Microsoft claims to implement, noting deviations and omissions. I believe I've seen that done with another browser, but can't recall which one.