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So. Adding stuff like the canvas tag (added to webkit to display dashboard widgets) and CSS transforms (ditto) is ok because they were going to submit them as s

by pilif 15y ago

So. Adding stuff like the canvas tag (added to webkit to display dashboard widgets) and CSS transforms (ditto) is ok because they were going to submit them as standards anyways. But adding another language besides JS is not ok because that would be bad for the web. Now, personally I don't care about dart, but I know that I had the same bad feeling back in the day when Safari learned the then nonstandard canvas tag than I have now when it should learn the nonstandard scripting language. I do find it hypocritical though to allow one and disallow the other.

kevingadd 15y ago
It should be pretty clear that Dart and Canvas are entirely different matters. There is very little about the two that's similar, beyond trivial things like how they both began nonstandard. Every browser vendor at times adds new tags or attributes if they think they can improve the web as a whole. When possible things are vendor prefixed, but still, it's something all the vendors do. It's the only way to get that technology into customers' hands. Even though the canvas API is arguably a bad design, it certainly gets the job done - and nobody else stepped up to solve the problem before Apple did. It also made it into standards relatively quickly, and was implemented by other browser vendors pretty easily.
wwweston 15y ago
Was there any standardized feature out there that canvas displaced? Heck, given that Flash didn't do generated bitmaps and Java applets were largely dead by the time canvas hit, was there anything that it displaced? Or even a similar competing feature in another browser? By contrast, Dart is squarely aimed at competing with a feature that's both a defacto and a formalized standard for web browsers. Not an abandoned and aging feature, either: JavaScript's proven far more capable than most of the industry gave it credit for, it's been growing and changing over time, and there's currently very active development, discussion, and collaboration underway to improve the language and its performance -- and expand the features exposed to it by various APIs. There's a world of difference between those two situations. In the former, you're introducing a new feature a platform doesn't have yet. In the later, you're splitting the industry on an existing feature.

by pilif 15y ago

kevingadd 15y ago

It should be pretty clear that Dart and Canvas are entirely different matters. There is very little about the two that's similar, beyond trivial things like how they both began nonstandard. Every browser vendor at times adds new tags or attributes if they think they can improve the web as a whole. When possible things are vendor prefixed, but still, it's something all the vendors do. It's the only way to get that technology into customers' hands. Even though the canvas API is arguably a bad design, it certainly gets the job done - and nobody else stepped up to solve the problem before Apple did. It also made it into standards relatively quickly, and was implemented by other browser vendors pretty easily.

wwweston 15y ago

Was there any standardized feature out there that canvas displaced? Heck, given that Flash didn't do generated bitmaps and Java applets were largely dead by the time canvas hit, was there anything that it displaced? Or even a similar competing feature in another browser? By contrast, Dart is squarely aimed at competing with a feature that's both a defacto and a formalized standard for web browsers. Not an abandoned and aging feature, either: JavaScript's proven far more capable than most of the industry gave it credit for, it's been growing and changing over time, and there's currently very active development, discussion, and collaboration underway to improve the language and its performance -- and expand the features exposed to it by various APIs. There's a world of difference between those two situations. In the former, you're introducing a new feature a platform doesn't have yet. In the later, you're splitting the industry on an existing feature.