> Wrong. That's *compiled* ASCII text. And don't try to tell me you > don't know the difference, but do try to explain why you think you need > to try to fool somebody here in such an ameturish fashion. > > Right, nothing wrong with a complied GUI. Plenty wrong with an
> interpreted GUI. Like what? The distinction between compiled and interpreted is pretty artificial. Compilation translates the code into another language that is then interpreted on the processor, in microcode. Interpretation just has a slightly higher-level interpreter. Most modern "interpreted" languages (javascript included) compile the program to bytecode and then execute the bytecode. The bytecode tends to be such as to map well to raw processor operations. Thus a possible drawback of an "interpreted" ui is that you have to recompile it every time (then the compiled version is stored in the XUL cache and not recompiled until the browser is restarted). Enter the fastload file, which persists the "compiled" version of the UI between browser runs. > Why does a UI need a "language"? I don't want my browser buttons to > do anything but push and do what they say on the label. You don't need a UI language. The developers writing they UI do. If they were using a "compiled" UI, they would still need to learn the corresponding language. In those cases it's called the toolkit API. All of this aside, I would be interested in hard numbers. In particular, the window open time for Mozilla as compared to window open time for a gecko browser with native UI (Galeon or somesuch). That would give us a target to shoot for.... -- Boris
