Why don’t those responsible for standards take a tip from the industry they operate in – software development – and release smaller, more concisely defined, standards as ‘point releases’.

The one thing the web is currently crying out for is better form controls. Look at all the JS libraries trying to hack controls like sliders, drag and drop, file upload, the list is long! These should be provided natively by the browser.

It is comical to babble on about the web as a developer platform that can compete with the desktop until these controls are mature and ubiquitous.

Unfortunately attempts to implement such simple improvements to the web get gobbled up by glitzy crap like SVG, Canvas (two drawing APIs for the web when arguably we don’t need one (yet)!) etc.

Xforms? Web Forms 2? Irrelevant! Get the damn controls in the browser! NOW!

When standards development is too slow, cut the crap and innovate!

A good example of that is this Drag and Drop DHTML Dialog. Its pretty cool. It is a total crowse-browser compatible drag and drop interface. An example is given with a simple dialog box. But it is written in object oriented javascript, which makes easy to reuse (namespace collisions etc).

So why wouldn’t you choose it as a first language? :-)

Throwing a reasonable JavaScript library removes that issue, and can be a good way to introduce some of the more advanced capabilities at the same time.

It’s not the language *I’d* choose as a first language, but browser incompatibility wouldn’t be the reason why.

I wondered, would we be able to preserve that low barrier to entry that makes JavaScript something you can pick up as your first language and feel confident after just a day or two?

I find this statement a little hard to swallow :-) I teach online courses for novice programmers and I would say that client-side Javascript is a really bad language to start with. Admittedly it’s C-style syntax, which will come in useful later, but the big problem IMHO is browser incompatibilities; you can get it working in Firefox for example, and then discover it’s broken in IE, or vice versa. This is very dispiriting for newbies. Many students give up in despair, because they can’t understand it — when they would have had a much easier time with PHP, for example.

“Comfortable in a day or two”? I’ve been programming for 20 years and I’m still not comfortable with Javascript — though admittedly I haven’t tried very hard ;-) I’ll be happy if someone can convince me otherwise!