Coding In Paradise

Moving past last call for HTML5 from Ian Hickson on 2009-02-19 (www-archive@w3.org from February 2009): "Realistically speaking, we'll never have complete consensus on everything in HTML5. At the simplest level, there are contradictory opinions on the very fundamentals of the work -- some people want error handling defined, some don't; some people want a schema, some don't; some people want APIs defined, some don't; the list is long. So consensus -- unanimity -- isn't an interesting goal. The next step down in terms of opinion-based progress is majority agreement, and I am confident that with the exception of things that need changing and will be changed in time for the next milestone, we have a majority agreement on everything in HTML5. Majority agreement in a self-selected community like an open working group is worth less than it would appear, though, because there is a selection bias: only people who are interested in both the technology and in standards development are going to take part. In the W3C working group, there is a further bar: we only allow people who are willing to put up with an inordinate amount of bureacuracy (to join) and noise to be part of the group whose opinion is measured. Statistically, therefore, the opinions of the working group almost certainly don't match the opinions of the whole Web community."

Crossing borders: JavaScript's language features: "In this article, I'll explore the features of JavaScript that make it so wonderfully attractive:

* Higher-order functions. A high-order function is one that either takes functions as arguments or returns a function. This feature lets JavaScript programmers manipulate functions in ways that the Java language can't.

* Dynamic typing. By delaying binding, JavaScript can be more concise and flexible.

* A flexible object model. JavaScript's object model uses a relatively uncommon approach to inheritance -- called prototypes -- instead of the Java language's more common class-based object model."

Joyeur: Open, Loving, Just Workingness: The Smart Platform and Javascript: "JavaScript is the natural language for the cloud, it's been existing in a sandboxed virtual container (the browser) for over a decade. It's had to use services (for data persistency, file access etc), its event messaging is the internet. If the Cloud is the Internet OS, then JavaScript is its language (nothing else comes to close to natural fit and breadth)." (Simon Wardley)