Comment by rebolek

3 months ago

Why should the browser contain a specific scripting language, like JavaScript, and not ActiveScript for example?

8 comments

rebolek

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xnx  3 months ago

I suspect you might know this, but Internet Explorer 3 supported JavaScript (JScript) and VBScript in 1996.

codedokode  3 months ago

The browser could use Java or .NET bytecode interpreter - in this case it doesn't need to have a compiler and you can use any language - but in this case you won't be able to see a script's source code.

  • const_cast  3 months ago

    You already effectively can't see a scripts source code because we compile, minify, and obfuscate JS these days. Because the performance characteristics are so poor.

    Actually, most of the time C# decompiles nicer from CLR bytecode than esoterically built JS.

krapp  3 months ago

It's a consequence of javascript being "good enough." Originally, the goal was for the web to support multiple languages (I think one prototype of the <script> tag had a "type=text/tcl") and IE supported VBScript for a while.

But at the end of the day, you only really need one, and the type attribute was phased out of the script tag entirely, and Javascript won.