Es4-discuss Digest, Vol 8, Issue 44

[Ric Johnson]

On 10/31/2007, "Brendan Eich" <brendan at mozilla.org> wrote:

>On Oct 30, 2007, at 3:59 PM, Yehuda Katz wrote:
>
>> I would specifically like to hear a realistic technical scenario
>> where the implementation of ES4 produces serious complications in
>> the open web.
>
>Me too. Here's one analysis of how ES4 might break existing scripts:
>
>* New keywords and syntax hanging off them. Already addressed by not
>opening the __ES4__ namespace without opt-in version selection, e.g.
>by <script type="application/ecmascript;version=4">. See the
>versioning proposal at
>
>http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=proposals:versioning

Brendan,

I know that a version string may help us avoid incompatibilities, however
I am also cognizant that this may serve the purpose of fragmenting the
language.  Look at what happened with VbScript.  If we open the door to
the version string, then Microsoft could add their own interpretation. 
I went through the pain of trying this with earlier JavaScript, and it
never worked.  It is not standard practice just to use the <script> tag
'plain'

Ric