A member of JavaScript 2. RM: What languages are you talking about here? DC: In particular Lisp and Smalltalk. RM: I want to skip to the web again and ask you about the main challenges for browsers in the next decade? DC: We need to solve the IE6 problem. IE6 used to be the best web browser in the world. But it has not aged well, and it is still surprisingly popular. This is a hardship for developers because it is difficult to develop applications that work well on IE6. Its popularity has been declining, but very slowly.
It has been able to hang on because developers have worked hard to support it. I think we need to stop doing that, and instead recommend that the IE6 community move to one of the many superior solutions. RM: When you look back at your career on all the things you have done is there one time or a period that stands out among all the others?
DC: When the bubble popped 10 years ago, it looked like there would be no more innovation and that we would be stuck with the web in its underdeveloped state. But things have gotten interesting again. This is a great time. Subscribe for more articles Fortnightly newsletters help sharpen your skills and keep you ahead, with articles, ebooks and opinion to keep you informed.
Fortnightly newsletters help sharpen your skills and keep you ahead, with articles, ebooks and opinion to keep you informed. He now specialises in social enterprise and is, among other things, a member of the Big Issue Invest advisory board. Capabilities I think are going to be a much more effective model for web applications.
When do you expect the HTML standard to finally be ratified and to become an official standard that browsers can implement? They are already implementing it. The browser makers are likely to be finished with it before it goes through the formal process.
For instance, any time you say Internet Explorer 6 a collective shudder falls over the audience. Do you see something similar happening with HTML5 given that so many browsers are already implementing portions of it before the standard is complete?
What is your favorite language and what is your second favorite language? Learning to think in that subset I think has made me a better programmer and I enjoy working in that language. So, as a result of that, JavaScript has become my favorite language. I think my second favorite language would be E. With ECMAScript 5 strict mode are there any concerns with the current or future browsers with the ability to utilize or implement that?
So Microsoft has a choice of either being standards compliant or not, and so far they have not said in public that they intend to be standards compliant. If they are, then everything is going to be great. IE 6 was by far the best and continued to be the best browser in the world for many years after, but the other browser makers have all gotten ahead of them.
And there is a chance that with IE 9 Microsoft might get that back. IE 9 is that good, except that it might not have Strict Mode in it. So depending on whether they do the complete language or not, JavaScript is the ultimate workaround tool.
But if the language is not complete, then life gets a lot harder for us. So depending on what Microsoft does with IE 9, it either possibly becomes the best web browser in the world, or it just becomes the next version of IE that we have to get rid of.
How can a web developer provide for browsers which implement HTML5 capabilities while still maintaining some compatibility with previous browsers? This is often referred to as the IE 6 problem. How do you address that as a web developer?
In the short term, life gets much worse for web developers. There is no winning if you are a web developer. So life gets tough. Ultimately, the only solution is we have to kill IE 6. In we had a similar pain point with Netscape 4. Netscape 4 was a crime against humanity. It was so bad that it made IE 6 look like the best web browser in the world. It took about five years for it to fade away. In I predicted that it would probably take a similar five years for IE 6 to go away.
In the way we have to kill it, the only tool available to us is to stop supporting it. Again, that pain is going to fall on developers, but ultimately that is the only way forward.
The Ajax libraries have been wonderful. In the Java world there was Java EE and that was progressing as it was progressing and there were things which were later described as anti-patterns, such as EJBs. What ended up changing the landscape there was that you had external innovators, such as Spring who were innovating outside of the standard and just doing things the right way. Do you see a similar process happening with the HTML5? Sadly no. For the last five years the innovation in browser technology shifted from the browser makers to the web developers.
So the Ajax libraries have been doing amazing things very quickly, very smartly improving the environment just by writing JavaScript well. Unfortunately that did not get fed back into HTML5. I do not know yet which will be done first. My primary machine is a Dell 17 inch laptop.
I do most of my text editing with Sublime Text. I like it because it is fast and it lets me turn off most of its annoying advanced features. I like simplicity. Microsoft provides a lot of value for free. I keep my projects on OneDrive. I use GitHub Desktop to push my public code. I use Prince to make PDFs of my books.
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