Why is ECMAScript still not a recommendation of W3C?

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+4 Q:

Why is ECMAScript still not a recommendation of W3C?

In theory browsers could support several programming languages for client-side scripting of web pages. In practice, ECMAScript is the only one widely implemented and used in all browsers. So for most people, it is an integral part of the web.

However, it has never been promoted as a recommendation by the W3C for web page scripting. And HTML5 does seems to promote it either, even though client-side interactivity is becoming more and more important. Why it is the case?

Is it to prevent a programming language monopoly on the web platform? (obviously failed)
Is it because the W3C prefers to concentrate ONLY on the declarative side of the web?
Or simply a political stance?

+4 A:

I'll take a stab at this: W3C tries to draft and recommend standards. *ECMA*script is already a standard, from ECMA. It doesn't need to re-ratify the language.

Something close to this is the w3c's attempts to standardize the document object model (DOM) by which all browsers interact with a HTML page using javascript/ecmascript (or vbscript or any other client-side scripting language.) This hasn't actually been smooth sailing tbh, but it's better than nothing (so they keep telling me)

http://www.w3.org/DOM/

-Oisin

x0n 2010-08-24 17:31:25

One standard shouldn't actually include another one, but it can reference it, recommend it, and even require it. There's be no problem, for a programming language to specify that floating-point numbers be in IEEE format.

David Thornley 2010-08-24 17:39:35

@david - sure, that makes sense for a composite scenario like floating point numbers within a language. But I don't think this is comparable.

x0n 2010-08-24 17:45:26

@David: Doing so is rather limited. For example, no programming language of which I'm aware actually requires or even endorses IEEE format as such. The ISO C and C++ standards (for example) endorse FP that conforms with another ISO standard (that happens to be based on and essentially identical to IEEE). IOW, they don't directly endorse somebody else's standard -- first they adopt it as their own, then endorse that.

Jerry Coffin 2010-08-24 17:52:29

As a counterexample, in the HTML5 draft they are explicitly referring standards from other standard-setting bodies, such as the ISO X3D specification for 3D content. - Part 12.2 Declarative 3D scenes "Embedding 3D imagery into XHTML documents is the domain of X3D, or technologies based on X3D that are namespace-aware".

Gabriel Cuvillier 2010-08-24 18:53:57

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Why is ECMAScript still not a recommendation of W3C?

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