Re: [Fsfe-uk] Re: An ignorant question?

[Mark Preston]

Hi Alex,
I don't agree with your assessment of the place for JavaScript in the future.
To quote Mike McGrath's book "JavaScript in easy steps" page 186 which begins
"The future looks bright for JavaScript with the introduction of the SVG file 
format to display Scalable Vector Graphics"  and ends with "The further 
extension of the browser DOM together with these exciting developments in SVG 
should ensure that JavaScript will continue adding magic to future websites."
I admire your efforts as I admire Mike McGrath's books, but given the option 
of whether to learn Flash or JavaScript I would opt for JavaScript. If you 
look forward to a free software based future, as I'm sure you do, exporting 
anything as Flash would not be a good move IMHO.

I am aware that there is currently a move away from client-side logic,
such as that provided by JavaScript routines, to server-side logic, such as
PHP, ASP, JSP, Python, C# and Java etc..
There are very good reasons for this and they may be partly in response to
open-source software:

* It frees the client browser from the responsibility of correctly
processing the JavaScript code.
  Indeed, some browsers do not have a JavaScript capability, or their
capability has been disabled by their paranoid user.

* It also avoids the discrepancies between browser implementations such as
the variation between Internet Explorer on the Mac and Windows platform and 
all the other browsers/ browser versions.

 * It absolutely absolves responsibility from the operating system but only
asks that its browser can display simple HTML output.

* More pertinent to future developments, the increasing range of devices
able to access Internet content may not always have the capability to
provide client-side processing logic. So the Web browser on a PDA need only
display HTML and any interactive logic must be processed on the server.

 * It is now taking a lot less time for messages to be sent to the server and
get  feedback compared to a few years ago.

 Maybe use of PHP would be better from the "free software" perspective?
The benefits of JavaScript in a school setting may still outweigh the 
drawbacks because the teacher can control the browser/version being used, and 
would not necessarily have to set up a server. Also, everybody has the ability 
to see the wonderful source code which doesn't happen with server side coding 
- again encouraging a new generation of coders to see the value of having 
access to the source codes.
A few years ago I tried out Qarbon ( www.qarbon.com ) which worked quite well 
at the time and is financially free to try out, but proprietary in nature. 
(Originally they paid people to write the "viewlets"!) It produces 
applets. I visited the pages I created and they no longer seem to work in the 
browsers/machines I am now using. They did work well at the time and maybe 
the latest versions may produce cheap but clear instructional guides for 
school lessons without too much difficulty for the teacher writing them. 
Possibly a cheap alternative to Flash?

JavaScript was and still is somewhat unreliable, but compared to a few years 
ago it is very reliable. Part of the problem a few years ago was that it was 
an integral part of the browser war. Now JavaScript is regarded as a less 
important battleground because of the move to server-side logic I have 
outlined above.
Regarding getting converts to Linux, I think the Frozen-Bubble game has just 
resulted in a couple more. My MIL and daughter went away on holiday taking 
the mickey about me taking my laptop with me and arrived back wanting 
Frozen-Bubble installed on their computers! They used the laptop more than I 
did!
Best regards,
Mark Preston

On Sunday 08 Jun 2003 9:45 pm, Alex Hudson wrote:
> On Sun, 2003-06-08 at 16:59, Ramanan Selvaratnam wrote:
> > >FWIW I would advise learning and using the JavaScript programming
> > > language and any text editor for animations.
> >
> > Please refer to
> > <http://www.mozilla.org/docs/dom/samples/>
> > for some possibilities for eye candy through scrpting Javascript with
> > CSS. Mozilla is the most standards compliant of the  widely used browser,
> > I guess.
>
> Doing courses with DHTML and Javascript doesn't fly at all,
> unfortunately - it's incredibly unreliable, and unusable for multimedia
> (sadly I have a lot of commercial experience in this area - multimedia
> learning, that is).
>
> > The interactive part of Flash is actually  a subset called
> > ActionScript....very similar but with less functionality.
> > The Flash making software automates the script for tose who click
> > buttons.
>
> The language (Javascript/ActionScript) actually isn't the issue - the
> issue is the API: Flash makes a lot of stuff available, which isn't in
> the DOM or isn't implemented correctly across a variety of browsers.
>
> > For SVG in Mozilla itself I saw this and thought some might be
> > interested...
> > <http://groups.google.com/groups?group=netscape.public.mozilla.svg>
>
> SVG is definitely the long-term answer. I'm not sure about the native
> support for it - as far as I know, the only 'decent' support comes from
> non-free plug-ins, even though SVG was designed to be easily implemented
> in modern browsers :/
>
> One thing I would note - OpenOffice.org1.1 has the ability to export to
> Flash. So, it might be possible to take your OOo Presenter XML, and
> translate that into HTML, Flash as well as showing it natively. Just
> another idea ;)
>
> Cheers,
>
> Alex.