What's the alternative ?

Posted Dec 14, 2007 23:24 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Ultimately... by jd
Parent article: Specifying codecs for the web

HTTP and HTML can only be replaced if there are better alternative. When such alternative will exist your points will be valid. May be. May be not - depends on the alternative. Right now situation with HTML looks like situation with C++ in ninetees: huge mess of incompatible implementation, strange extensions, etc. A lot of guys sai back then that C++ is near the end of it's life and we will stop using C++ in a few years. Guess what: C++ was standartized, incompatibilties mostly fixed and today it's still one of the most popular languages. Why do you think it's impossible to do the same with HTML ?

Oh and the same problem as with HTML exist with C++ too: there are exactly zero 100% standard compliant compilers! It does not matter in practice: incompatibilities are in small corners of language which can be easily avoided...

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What's the alternative ?

Posted Dec 15, 2007 0:12 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

I'm not sure if you could call separate compilation of templates a `small 
corner of the language', really. It's just so hard to implement that 
everyone has got used to doing without it, and there *are* ways to get 
along without it.

Separate compilation of templates ? There are no such thing.

Posted Dec 15, 2007 23:16 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

Do you mean templates export ? The thing does not exist in real world and should not exist in real world. And since all compilers (except one) don't support it you can just remove it from the spec (AFAIK C++ committee plans to do just that). So yes, it's minor thing. We'll see if Theora support will be the same "minor thing" in HTML5...