Albatross! : internetexplorer

I feel happy, too...

cwilso — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 15:33:00 GMT

...that someone got it. Thanks, Hal - standards compliance and not breaking existing websites are, in fact, why I show up to work.

BTW, I will be at Web Directions North 08, MIX08, and (this just in) SXSW08.

Not that you need me to tell you this...

cwilso — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 23:09:00 GMT

...but IE8 now correctly renders the Acid2 smiley face in IE8 standards mode.

My opinion.

cwilso — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 01:36:00 GMT

Golly, I love this job.

Okay, before you read any further, go read the tagline of this blog. In case you're reading it through RSS, I'll paste it here: "This is the personal blog of Chris Wilson, Platform Architect of the Internet Explorer Platform team at Microsoft (and ex-Group Program Manager)." Underscore that "personal" bit.

Okay, now go read the last line of the first paragraph of my last post. Again, for your convenience: “Consider the rest of this post to be only my opinion, because I haven't even run it by the other people on the team.” Consider that to be true of this post as well. (This post, too, has not been run past anyone here.)

Now we've established that this blog, and the last post as well as this one, are just me talking, and not the "Voice of Microsoft" (said in your best James Earl Jones voice).

So, hmm. "Open letter to Chris Wilson." "Mozilla, Microsoft drawing sabers over next JavaScript." "We can't afford another browser war." (I'm with ya there.) Front page of Slashdot. And so on. Does anyone wonder why I don't post so often on my own blog?

Brendan, my post was my opinion, and (I thought) clearly labelled as such. Sorry you take it personally, and you should feel free to disagree with my opinion. Please don't call me a liar, though - or at least, credit me with enough intelligence to make my own lies up, and not simply parrot those of others. In my opinion, the current ECMAScript 4 proposal would be disruptive to the web ecosystem, and I don’t think the priorities driving its evolution have been placed where I would place them. (E.g., as I said before, I’d like to see domain security addressed in the core language.) That said, it’s my opinion.

When I made a reference to "shouting down dissent," I thought again that I was being clear that I was referring more to the string of blog comments made by you and others immediately to any blog post that seemed to question the righteousness of the current ES4 proposal, than to functioning of the TG-1. The response to this post, and others in the last day or so, doesn’t make me want to retract that. I was not referring to actual shouting in TG-1 meetings - I’d have to agree with your characterization of “vigorous debate” - though I think you seem a mite personally hostile to Microsoft. That's a personal-interaction observation, though, and not reflected in minutes, and therefore not worth much.

However, please do not EVER characterize me personally as pushing a proprietary language or platform over open standards based ones, unless you have proof of such action (which you do not, because I am not). I gave my opinion about ES4, not about Javascript as a long-term language for the web; I have no personal interest in pushing C# (a language in which, BTW, I've never considered myself a proficient programmer) or some "new invention" language in place of Javascript, and I've yet to hear anyone in Microsoft give a solid enough scenario for such a thing that it changes my professional opinion to be in support of C# in place of Javascript either. It's a shame that the last couple of days of posting, yours included, have presumed that I have any interest in a language different than Javascript; my opinion is that ES4 is becoming a huge new language but claiming to be just an update on to the already-well-known Javascript language, not that Javascript is the wrong language. (Oh, and there is no secret "alternate language" proposal that I'm aware of; ideally, I'd like to see different priorities addressed in ES4.)

I think ECMAScript can evolve more cautiously (than the large-scale language changes in ES4) and have that be a better thing for the web, considering how it deploys in the ecosystem. That would only work, though, if we're working together. If you truly believe that Silverlight (and by this I must presume you really mean C# in the Silverlight-hosted VM) will take over because of careful evolution of Javascript would take too long, then I suggest you follow the path I recommended in the original post in the IEBlog - make a new proprietary language, call it something different, and if it's that much better then it will get adoption. Proprietary can always evolve faster than openly designed, consensus -driven industry standards. Regardless, though, I have no intent of "helping Microsoft stall improvements to JS while they aggressively evolve C# and its runtimes" - in fact, I personally think those are orthogonal issues, and Javascript's current lack of strong typing, say, doesn't help or hurt C# adoption. I expect you have a different opinion, given your posts, and I simply respectfully disagree. I think (again, personally) that Javascript has a lot more going for it in the web ecosystem, and I don't personally see C# pushing it out of the way.

Brendan, you also said (in comments on your own blog post that I 'reversed the logic of ScreamingMonkey to try to "prove" that ES4 requires a new VM.'

No, I never tried to "prove" that ES4 requires a new VM. I said 1) ScreamingMonkey pushes a new VM into IE, and will cause ES4 scripts to not be run in the same VM as ES3, within IE. (True, yes? Please tell me if I'm wrong here, as I'm (obviously) not as intimately familiar with ScreamingMonkey as you are.) And I also said 2) in my opinion, ES4 VM compatibility with ES3 (in perf characteristics in particular, but I'm betting in other ways as well) will likely cause interop problems. I understand your ideal is that an ES4 VM ought to be able to run ES3 scripts; I expressed skepticism this will happen, given the scope of changes to the language in ES4. Again, my opinion.

You said "To prove this, I'll make a promise: if Microsoft truly embraces ES4 and ships it in an IE beta, I'll put ScreamingMonkey on hiatus." I don’t care personally if you put ScreamingMonkey on hiatus or not. I think it’s self-defeating, personally - if it does ship and gets uptake, it would cause compat problems for us to take over handling ES4 in our own VM later. It's kinda saying you expect Microsoft can't to come up with an interoperable implementation of the future Javascript standard.

Personally, I think you'd have been better served following my personal one-on-one advice to you back in March at SXSW - try to work WITH the Microsoft Script guys, because they are neither crazy nor trying to obstruct progressing Javascript to a good, powerful, competitive-with-other-modern-languages future. They may have different ideas of how big a step you can take at a time, but none of us are looking to stagnate Javascript, as you have claimed. I'd like to see more than "deferred JScript maintenance and ES3 spec-polishing," despite what you think.

I think thus far you have preferred not to follow that advice. I'd prefer not to have a "split" in TG-1; I'd prefer that we evolve Javascript in a way that will work for more of the web (browsers, developers, et al) at the same time. Perhaps instead of thinking that Microsoft has to lose, you should think about how we could all win.

What I think about ES4.

cwilso — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 20:05:00 GMT

Dean Edwards asked me in a comment on the IEBlog what I personally thought of the ES4 proposal. ('You say that "Microsoft" think that the web is best served by the creation of a new language. Your name is at the bottom of this article. What do *you* think?' - I'll let the FUD comment bounce off. Damned if we do, damned if we don't say anything.) Consider the rest of this post to be only my opinion, because I haven't even run it by the other people on the team.

In a way, I'd say it's somewhat immaterial what I personally think, because I am not and have never claimed to be a programming languages expert. Yes, I used to be a developer; but just because I know how to drive a car doesn't qualify me to design one.

On the other hand, I DO know what principles I would place on a new car, and how I would prioritize them (off the top of my head for my primary car: safety, emissions, fuel economy, handling, passenger comfort, cargo space, acceleration) to a qualified car designer. I've spent a lot of time over the past year with a few people at Microsoft who DO know a thing or two about language design, including those who participate on the ECMA TG-1 committee.

*I* think there are two approachs to take to moving the state of "programming language for the web" forward. One of them is to evolve Javascript in place (pardon me for collapsing ECMAScript, JavaScript, JScript et al together; it's just easier, and one cup of coffee is not enough for me to be prepared to play semantic games). That requires one set of principles - ensuring stability of the ecosystem as it is today should take priority, furthering the interoperability of implementations (which is a problem today), enhancing performance and security, and then cool new language functionality. Those are the priorities I think should be placed on evolving Javascript.

As I understand it, on the other hand, the ES4 proposal introduces a lot of new language functionality that essentially changes the character of the language. I don't personally have a problem with that language as a language - but I think grafting that different-in-character-language together with a compatible-and-performant implementation of the Javascript of today is both super-hard (if even possible) to get right, and is ignoring the bigger problems of language-for-web, namely interoperating with all the script that is out there. (I'd also take on other challenges first if I were redesigning Javascript - e.g. domain-aware security as a language tenet. That's Monday-morning quarterbacking the ES4 design as a new language proposal though.)

My point is that it's a fallacy to think that you're evolving Javascript if your expectation is that the scripts will have a different type param, and be handled by a separate runtime (i.e. the ScreamingMonkey approach). That doesn't seem like it will have good interop to me, at least not in a world where mashups and separate code components from disparate places (all of which are some variant of ES3 today) are the norm.

Sadly, this seems to be turning into an "ES4: yes or no" battle. That's unfortunate, because I don't think anyone should settle into the trenches, and I don't think the other Microsoft guys ever intended to say "everything about ES4 is bad". It's been pointed out that we haven't made an alternate proposal - well, I'd kinda hoped we could work it out together. "Open to input" should be the way of the web, should it not? I think it's a shame that dissenting opinion has been hidden from view, and not publicized; certainly, I think the Microsoft response hasn't been very audible, but that's partly because we've been trying to figure out if it's just us - but of course, us trying to understand what other people think of the proposal in detail has also generated some apparent conspiracy-theorism. I also think it's a shame that the response to any dissent has equated to shouting the dissenters down. The string of blog posts over the last week, and the immediate and somewhat incendiary comments from ES4 proponents, has been a good example of that.

Hey, everyone can have an opinion.

Phone interview with Jon Udell

cwilso — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 01:33:00 GMT

Jon Udell called me up a week or two ago and asked me a bunch of questions about web history, IE and the HTML WG. I think it's actually broadly interesting, and for once I don't sound like a third grader on speed. Well, too much.

Check it out.

IE re-downloading background images

cwilso — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 19:53:00 GMT

Quick post - at the Ajax Experience conference, someone mentioned to me that IE was downloading background images multiple times if they were referenced in the stylesheets multiple times. I checked with the team, and they confirmed that they did address this problem in IE7, and it should be fixed (they tried reproducing it multiple different ways to be sure). Unfortunately, I forgot to get the name of the person who mentioned this to me - so if you're out there, this is fixed, and thanks for the feedback.

-C

I'm leaving my position as IE platform Group Program Manager…

cwilso — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 17:06:00 GMT

…HA! Gotcha!

I’ve been juggling multiple roles on the IE team for a while. With the release of IE7, I decided (with my management’s support, of course) to focus my energy on the design of the IE web developer platform as the lead platform architect, rather than managing the platform program management team as group program manager. This means I won’t have anyone reporting to me, but will oversee the design of the entire IE platform from the perspective of web developers.

Obviously (since I chose it) I’m excited by this opportunity; I’ll have more time to focus on the big picture of our platform and how the pieces fit together. I’m going to be sad not to manage people for a while, since I really enjoy helping my teammates develop their careers (though of course I will continue to do this through mentoring). However, I’m very pleased that my cohort Doug Stamper will be taking over the management of the core of the IE platform program management. Doug and I have worked together for a couple of years now, and there’s no one I could be more comfortable working with or to whom I would be more confident handing over my people management responsibilities.

Note that this is a bit different job than the usual Microsoft “Software Architect” position – I'm focusing on designing the platform that web devs use on IE, not designing our own codebase. I will remain in the Program Management team, and though I expect I’ll be poking my nose in the code more often to understand some things better, I won’t be directly responsible for coding duties – we have a couple of great Software Architects and a great dev team who are much better at that than I am. I’m still working out exactly what this position will mean, of course. (For the curious, this isn't a promotion or a demotion - in fact, I don't know (or much care) if my official title will change or not, either.)

So rest assured – this doesn’t mean you’ll see less of me, or that I will have less of an effect on the IE team as a whole – likely quite the opposite. I will continue to speak publicly, and hopefully will get to blog more often, etc.

-Chris