In a move that could have a huge impact on the future of the web, the EcmaScript language standards body has killed the draught version of EcmaScript 4.0.

This draught version was widely recognised as a great improvement for JavaScript and formed the basis of Flex and the current versions of Flash because EcmaScript 4.0 is known as ActionScript in the Adobe world.

Microsoft are once again at the forefront of this as they point blank refused to adopt the proposed standard, ensuring that IE 8 has absolutely no support for it at all.

The result of all this is quite astounding really. Adobe are no longer ahead of the game with ActionScript, instead they now have a proprietary Open Source scripting language. The rest of the industry has a watered down, much less useful and far less innovative version.

Well done Microsoft! once again thinking of your own bank account over the benefits to the user.

I have really started to get my teeth into Flex and I for one am a big supporter of ActionScript. Coming from a JavaScript developers perspective I felt that it was a HUGE improvement and defenitely the way things should have gone.

I think this is just more proof that Microsoft’s new open initiative is all spin and no substance, they sure like to appear more open and part of the Open Source crowd then they go do something stupid like this.

It’s the same old story all over again, if it isn’t done the way Microsoft want it done then it gets stomped on.

You can read Brendan Eich’s announcement here. Feel free to go all slackjawed and rant.

The basic points are that we will get 2 interoperable implementations of EcmaScript 3.1 by early next year.
There will be a collaboration on post ES3.1 and i need to quote this because I can’t bring myself to justifyingly paraphrase it:

2. Collaborate on the next step beyond ES3.1, which will include
syntactic extensions but which will be more modest than ES4 in both
semantic and syntactic innovation.

They actually put it out in black and white that they are going to be less innovative… deliberately.

Apparently Packages, namespaces and early binding are off the table for good, these will never be part of EcmaScript because they have been

deemed unsound for the Web

There will also be some rephrasing of other goals and ideas to keep concensus in the committee including the notion of classes based on ES3 concepts combined with proposed ES3.1 extensions.

I wanted to find out what Douglas Crockford had to say about all this and as usual his blog has a typical crockfordian response. You’ll be wanting the entry titled harmony.

I haven’t been able to find any official comment from Adobe on this yet. I assume they are going to have a few big decisions to make in the next few weeks and months. I for one hope that they don’t water down ActionScript though I’m sure from a business perspective, going it alone with a proprietary solution is exactly what they tried to avoid in the first place.

Hank Williams has a great blog entry on this that sparked me off on the trail to find out more.