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The browsers themselves are already built and powered using JS. Maintaining a comprehensive API at the speed that web tech advances in more than one client-sid

The browsers themselves are already built and powered using JS. Maintaining a comprehensive API at the speed that web tech advances in more than one client-side scripting language would be hellish -- browser vendors already have enough trouble agreeing on CSS and JS standards. The Stack Overflow article already raised a number of good reasons why not. Not sure why this is garnering so much attention from HN.

dman 15y ago
Why arent browser UI's created using HTML, CSS and JS ?
- wwweston 15y ago
  I think the various Mozilla projects actually do have facilities for this, and that some significant portion of the chrome is done this way. Where browser UIs aren't done this way, though, I suspect it's because the APIs are for components that aren't markup based -- you write the software for the platform with the APIs it provides, or (as I believe Mozilla has done) you write your own platform on top of something else. I think the real question to ask yourself is -- if the conventional patterns of the desktop API that we'd more or less laid down by the mid 90s were so generally awesome, why didn't some universal client based on them take off instead of the web? It's not as if we didn't have network aware desktop-style clients at the time...
  - dman 15y ago
    I think we are asking opposite questions - if web based UI's are so awesome and have no caveats attached for display based apps then why are browsers not written using HTML, CSS and JS ? I am asking this question because I know at least one person from mozilla has replied to this thread.
  - randomdata 15y ago
    "why didn't some universal client based on them take off instead of the web?" Because you had several companies all fighting to have their desktop platform be the standard. The web slipped in the back door because nobody felt threatened by a hyperlink document publishing system. As such, it was the only platform that was available everywhere. Worse is better. Interestingly, the web is starting to adopt the old desktop model. If you look at many of the emerging frameworks for web development (talking client side here), they all seem to be loosely based on the work of OpenStep. It is actually a really great question posed by dman. If the web is suitable for applications, the browser chrome should be one of those such applications.
- Tobu 15y ago
  In large part they are. Mozilla Firefox is 80% JS, and the chrome is XUL, an XML language.
zanny 15y ago
Because we all hate javascript. I just wish they decoupled javascript engines and browsers, made a language agnostic api spec for the DOM, and just let html <script> tags require a language ref and the browser would be expected to try to find a runtime on the local machine or ask the user to install it. The monopolistic nature of javascript in client web browsing is bad for innovation.
- jlongster 15y ago
  Really? You're discounting all of the incredible webapps, games, and social networking on the web. If Javascript was bad for innovation, I sure don't see it. You're talking language syntax. Although it matters, it practically doesn't. People build stuff no matter what the language looks like. Look at Obj-C, that thing is horrid (syntax-wise) but look at all the developer adoption. What is bad for innovation is to move back to the 90's where people had to handle local instances of applications, fix versioning problems, and have to install something just because they want one small piece of functionality.
  - riffraff 15y ago
    > If Javascript was bad for innovation, I sure don't see it. This is a fallacy: in absence of a peek at some alternative world where something else was available, you can't tell that javascript improved or worsened the innovation rate.
    - wwweston 15y ago
      It seems pretty reasonable to observe the desktop world, though, since it has the properties under discussion, and ask ourselves whether it's easier to deploy an application to a wide audience there or on the web.
      - slurgfest 15y ago
        Well, the problem is that this confounds all the properties of "the desktop world" with the properties of another client-side substitute for Javascript (like, say, Dart or some language using NaCl)

dman 15y ago

Why arent browser UI's created using HTML, CSS and JS ?

wwweston 15y ago
I think the various Mozilla projects actually do have facilities for this, and that some significant portion of the chrome is done this way. Where browser UIs aren't done this way, though, I suspect it's because the APIs are for components that aren't markup based -- you write the software for the platform with the APIs it provides, or (as I believe Mozilla has done) you write your own platform on top of something else. I think the real question to ask yourself is -- if the conventional patterns of the desktop API that we'd more or less laid down by the mid 90s were so generally awesome, why didn't some universal client based on them take off instead of the web? It's not as if we didn't have network aware desktop-style clients at the time...
- dman 15y ago
  I think we are asking opposite questions - if web based UI's are so awesome and have no caveats attached for display based apps then why are browsers not written using HTML, CSS and JS ? I am asking this question because I know at least one person from mozilla has replied to this thread.
- randomdata 15y ago
  "why didn't some universal client based on them take off instead of the web?" Because you had several companies all fighting to have their desktop platform be the standard. The web slipped in the back door because nobody felt threatened by a hyperlink document publishing system. As such, it was the only platform that was available everywhere. Worse is better. Interestingly, the web is starting to adopt the old desktop model. If you look at many of the emerging frameworks for web development (talking client side here), they all seem to be loosely based on the work of OpenStep. It is actually a really great question posed by dman. If the web is suitable for applications, the browser chrome should be one of those such applications.
Tobu 15y ago
In large part they are. Mozilla Firefox is 80% JS, and the chrome is XUL, an XML language.

zanny 15y ago

Because we all hate javascript. I just wish they decoupled javascript engines and browsers, made a language agnostic api spec for the DOM, and just let html <script> tags require a language ref and the browser would be expected to try to find a runtime on the local machine or ask the user to install it. The monopolistic nature of javascript in client web browsing is bad for innovation.

jlongster 15y ago
Really? You're discounting all of the incredible webapps, games, and social networking on the web. If Javascript was bad for innovation, I sure don't see it. You're talking language syntax. Although it matters, it practically doesn't. People build stuff no matter what the language looks like. Look at Obj-C, that thing is horrid (syntax-wise) but look at all the developer adoption. What is bad for innovation is to move back to the 90's where people had to handle local instances of applications, fix versioning problems, and have to install something just because they want one small piece of functionality.
- riffraff 15y ago
  > If Javascript was bad for innovation, I sure don't see it. This is a fallacy: in absence of a peek at some alternative world where something else was available, you can't tell that javascript improved or worsened the innovation rate.
  - wwweston 15y ago
    It seems pretty reasonable to observe the desktop world, though, since it has the properties under discussion, and ask ourselves whether it's easier to deploy an application to a wide audience there or on the web.
    - slurgfest 15y ago
      Well, the problem is that this confounds all the properties of "the desktop world" with the properties of another client-side substitute for Javascript (like, say, Dart or some language using NaCl)