the web needs a common bytecode and PNaCl + LLVM is the best option. i recommend reading the comments (like the one from ant57) here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2057415

i’ve tried the html/js/css combo with various frameworks. no question, it’s a kludge of crap. beyond writing a simple webpage, i couldn’t see myself as an html5 dev and enjoying my job.

but as a former flash/flex dev, i was at a crossroads. for my future, i’ve chose to write native iOS apps as an alternative to html5 web apps. go native or go home.

If you’re still following the comments here, Mike, I’m curious to know what else you think I’m dismissing that you didn’t cover. I think it’s more that I’m advocating one specific option, and I didn’t spend time comparing it with alternatives.

The most optimal solution regarding time to market and guarantee of success, though it disappoints me to say it, would be start developing a open plugin that supports the types of benefits Mitnick describes using formats and proven technologies that are already unproprietized and open, ie: AS3 (or any other appropriate language), SVG, etc. to fill in where their creators will not, or as you suggest, fight the battle to convince the browsers to do it for us.

It sickens me that it is coming to this all over again because of political BS regarding Flash / Flex, HTML 5, CSS 3, JS from corporate slap fights, uneducated buzz-word driven blind fanatics, and worst, developers unwilling to look at every language / technology if for nothing else to identify and understand the merits and build a better environment for us all. We need to start by reminding ourselves that we are where we are today mostly for that fact…we allow this constant feeling of “almost there” unifying technologies with no end because we can’t accept where they came from or why they started succeeding in the first place and so pit them against each other in arguments that only we and our users only lose from. We allow biases in ourselves that directly compete with the very passion for elegance, problem solving, and analytical thinking that our field of science demands of us (and yes, I count web development as part of Computer Science).

With this in mind, how can anyone claim JS was designed for any of the demands we ask of it today, not just in compilation, but as a language? ActionScript as a further implementation of the ECMAScript standard that at least stands in for JS in relative similarity while offering amazing flexibility as a language. If it didn’t have Adobe’s name on it, which it isn’t proprietized at all btw, or come from flash, do you think anyone would really have a problem liking it?

And is the diffused, fragmented environment that web browser vendors create and continue to encourage the same group of hands we want holding that future? I can’t bring myself to ask that of them when they can’t handle a single W3C standard to this day in completeness at even roughly a similar timeline, and this is completely ignoring the disaster they have made of CSS and JS. Even the ECMAScript standard itself became a political battlefield of corporate ownership and disagreements about what is best for the vendors as opposed to the best solution.

I felt this way long before the recent announcements from Adobe. We are so far behind where we should be because we didn’t make this realization long before Macromedia did all this work for us, actively leaving all of their formats and languages un-proprietized for us to build upon and take over at will. MS and Apple were never willing to step up to the plate with that. Now, I’m not sure our own community is willing to take a hard look and realize that shoving this all into JS / HTML / CSS is the poor move, as opposed to bringing AS3 and many other great technologies, regardless of their source into the standards fold.

Thanks for inspiring a thought-out conversation and I hope this comment is clear that my intention is to participate in that, albeit I am pointing out that I feel your post dismisses many options, only some of which I described.

Cheers.

What’s the difference between CoffeeScript or AS3 compiling down to JS and AS3 compiling to bytecode? Arguably, its the same sort of abstraction.