BWahhaahhahahaha! MS refuse to ship a PERL interpreter with XP and IE6. Quick, sue them for...  ONE BILLION dollars! It's not fair they refused to ship a Python interpreter. Sue the bastards. There's no PHP interpreter shipped with XP. Call the lawyers. Back in the real world, they stopped shipping a JVM and licensing Java from SUN. So SUN sues them for 1 billion Dollars! So the poor consumer has to download a 10Mb install instead. Except that they haven't upgraded to the latest JDK this week, so it's another 10Mb download that leaves the old JDK still installed. And there's some Borland code on the machine which brought it's own JVM and JIT so that's another one. What's wrong with this picture? Can't SUN compete by just shipping better code, dammit? Macromedia seem to be able to manage this with Flash and Director, why not SUN?

But seriously now folks. There's a number of things that you just can't do in HTML with plain old Javascript especially when the document model[1] isn't common across all browsers and platforms. Like build a decent wysiwyg html editor to replace the brain dead TEXTAREA. Or use a tree control. Or have linked combo boxes. Or update some text without refreshing the whole page. Or embedding an IRC/Chat control. And the only safe, platform neutral technology we've got to do this sort of thing is Java. We do actually need a common solution to this, that's painless and generally pre-installed. But it seems that as long as SUN, MS and plenty of others insist on picking fights, we're not going to get it. Now how long is it since the whole Java vs ActiveX battle started? 7 years? Isn't it time these idiots worked out a solution or agreement?

[1]Can someone please explain to me why Opera, Netscape and Mozilla don't support the MS IE document model? As someone else said, is this a "penis size bragging" thing? If it is, then boy, have I got some spam for you. happy


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[ 10-Mar-02 9:16am ]