On Jul 28, 3:33 am, "Glen Lipka" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > http://commadot.com/?p=581 > > I would love your thoughts on it.
To quote that post: "First of all, I would only have to test ONE browser, regardless of whether you used IE, FF, or Safari." To play devil's advocate for a moment... That was also the promise of Java when it came out, but it took over 7 years for Java applets to be reasonably cross-browser. Seriously, when i developed Java applets (back in the late 90's), i spent about 1/4th of my time debugging browser-specific issues (and 90% of that time was chasing Netscape-specific problems). i see nothing fundamentally different between Java's dream of portability and this dream of portability, because the underlying tool is still essentially a virtual machine which must be ported to multiple platforms and therefore subject to portability issues. "Least common denominator" will always be an issue when it comes to cross- platform tools. Then there's the issue of how to support external plugins from within this, such as embedded Java applets or even embedded flash apps (which requires embedding a Flash interpreter within the already-running Flash interpreter). <opinion type='unpopular'>i think it's a nice idea, but a pipe dream.</ opinion>
