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Maybe? But there was enough demand for other languages/capabilities that the Java and Flash plugins existed. At the peak of the browser wars I'd have expected
by dcminter 5y ago
Maybe? But there was enough demand for other languages/capabilities that the Java and Flash plugins existed.
At the peak of the browser wars I'd have expected this to be something tried to get mindshare (or maybe it was and didn't work well enough that I ever heard about it?)
Edit: E.g. HTML 4 spec (at least) offers text/tcl as a plausible language value. Did anyone ever offer that? Surely someone must have supported text/lisp as well at least briefly :)
- danudey 5y agoIf anything would support text/lisp, it would be the browser built into emacs that my coworker keeps pointing out VIM doesn't have.
- dcminter 5y agoI congratulate you; if you cannot have an ally then a worthy foe is almost as good ;)
- blacksqr 5y agoAccording to stories I heard from people who were in the room, the W3C was on the verge of adopting Tcl as the preferred browser scripting language, when Java suddenly and unexpectedly got popular and Netscape decided they could use it as a network system language to challenge Microsoft. JavaScript came shortly afterwards, developed and named purely for marketing reasons to bolster Java uptake. Then came Microsoft's ever-so-slightly incompatible Jscript, and the next ten years of web history was a fight to see who could lock the most web developers in the trunk. No room for alternative languages in that scenario.