Well, whomever is holding things up, a standard is only a guideline, right? And that's the risk you take when you base a technology on a comittee: sometimes, and for whatever reason, that committee might steer things in a different direction than you originally intended. Otherwise Adobe would be just another bully in the playground instead of a partner. So what happened was inevitable. Whether it's MS's fault or anyone else's we could debate until we're blue in the face. Who cares?
If the committee in charge of the standard is holding back innovation, there are three choices: 1) stifle innovation in favour of the committee's wishes; 2) abandon the standard altogether; 3) create a new standard out of the ashes of the old. Thank god Adobe isn't kowtowing to the new Harmony standard, that would horribly cripple ActionScript. As an ActionScript developer, I want more innovation, not less, thank-you-very-much. That leaves Adobe with the uncomfortable choice of 2) or 3): each have their drawbacks. Adobe could abandon any ECMA standard altogether, and they'd be within their rights to do so. I don't see Java suffering for SUN's decision not to associate with (what is now) ECMA. (Other than the fact that it's a server-side dinosaur *ducks, runs* :) [KIDDING!] But ultimately I believe Adobe's best bet would be to form their own working committee, their own ECMA standard, similar to what MS has done with C#. Maybe then we'll see private constructors, method overloading and multiple inheritance in the language. Being a pessimist about web standardization, I could not envision the day when ActionScript would ever become a _usable_ web standard, so this comes as no great surprise. Hell, the WC3 and the various browser makers can't get their head out of their ass long enough to put together a standard that will be adopted in less than 20 years for crying out loud. What makes you think ActionScript would ever be adopted in enough browsers with enough standardization not to repeat the utter compatibility mess that CSS/JS is currently in? It's a fantastic idea, but I think Adobe's decision to try and have ActionScript in its current incarnation through tamarin be adopted as a new web standard was too far ahead of its time. I agree with one statement that has been made, can't remember by whom: the web is not ready for ECMAScript 4. Hell, it's not even ready for JavaScript 3 or CSS 3. Adobe would do far better to create their own standard that doesn't try to shoehorn the rest of the web into ActionScript, and get on with continuing being a serious programming language. Let the web standards pundits have ECMA 3.1 and Harmony. Maybe by the time my grandchildren are doing web programming it'll be ready for prime time. And people like myself can focus on developing robust web applications that actually work, with a serious language that continues to kick ass all over the internet. _______________________________________________________________ Joseph Balderson, Flash Platform Developer | http://joeflash.ca hank williams wrote: >> I don't quite see how it's a big step backward *or* a black eye for >> Adobe (as your blog argued). There are dozens of languages in >> widespread use out there... AS3 being (approximately) based on a >> standard, while a good bullet point for marketing, never yielded any >> advantage as far as I could see. >> > > This is a valid point, but the reason I call it a black eye is because > adobe spent a lot of time hanging their hat on the idea that this was > going to be a standard. To the extent that was helpful to them (I > presume it was otherwise they wouldnt have bothered) it is no longer > an accurate statement. Adobe wanted the industry to move one way, and > Microsoft forced it to move another way. > > Hank > >> Troy. >> > > > -- > blog: whydoeseverythingsuck.com > > ------------------------------------ > > -- > Flexcoders Mailing List > FAQ: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/flexcoders/files/flexcodersFAQ.txt > Search Archives: > http://www.mail-archive.com/flexcoders%40yahoogroups.comYahoo! Groups Links > > > >
