Agreed, languages used in web development should come with a government health warning. Ever noticed that Opera seems to understand CSS better than most browsers? Could be related to the fact that their tech lead was one of the CSS originators. SQL is even worse, it was created as an IBM proof-of-concept and kind of escaped from the lab. (CJ Date has writen extensively about it, it lacks basic consistency in the language constructs let alone logic issues and null handling etc.) Now Microsoft have been caught trying to stack the standards committees to wrest control of ODF so that can butcher it to be consistent with OOXML and their ghastly office formats. Caveat Emptor.
On Wed, 08 Oct 2008 09:39:38 +1300, Grant Paton-Simpson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Hi, > > A couple of interesting snippets from an interesting interview > (http://www.sitepoint.com/article/interview-doug-crockford/): > > Javascript's rushed birth: > > Kevin Yank: [It’s] continually surprising to me just how capable a > language it is, given where it came from. I mean, one day in the 1990s, > Netscape said, “We need a little language to run in our browser.” And > what we ended up with was very close to the JavaScript that we have > today. How did Netscape end up with it as a language, answering that > need at the time? > > Douglas Crockford (Yahoo): They were really lucky. Given the process > that created the language, we should have gotten something much, much > worse, because they didn’t do a careful design of requirements. They > certainly didn’t give enough time for its design or its implementation. > They took a prototype, which was intended just as a proof of concept, > and that’s what they shipped. And it had all the problems that you would > > expect such an implementation to have. And it was partly on the basis of > that implementation that the language got the terrible reputation that > it had. And a lot of those defects are still in the language. > > ... > > Problematic history of CSS: > > Douglas Crockford: [In] the last few years web standards—at least for > the last ten years—web standards have lost focus. They've been more > about invention than about codification, and I think that is unhealthy. > At best it's been unproductive, and at worst we've seen bad standards > come out of that. > > For example, CSS2 was un-implementable, and eventually it had to be > revised as CSS2.1—an attempt to cut CSS2 down to what people were able > to figure out how to implement. That sequence was totally backwards—or > it started backwards, but eventually they got it right. Let's look at > what can actually work and make a standard out of that, and then let > everybody catch up with each other. I think that's a proper role for > standards. > > What I see happening now with HTML5 is appalling. There is some stuff > there that I really like: I really like that they figured out what the > rules of HTML <http://www.sitepoint.com/glossary.php?q=H#term_75> > parsing are. Brilliant. That's long overdue. And you can look at any > individual feature that they're doing and say, “Yeah, that makes > sense.” > But there’s just too much, and there’s not a good set of trade-offs, > there’s not a complexity budget. It’s not motivated by real need, but > by > what’s shiny in front of a committee. > > > > All the best, Grant > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ NZ PHP Users Group: http://groups.google.com/group/nzphpug To post, send email to nzphpug@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
