Thinking Clearly .

Why? Cause it’s the bomb.

I’m definitely a come-lately. I mean, I was fairly old school “oh no! inaccessible, insecure, hideous Javscript web pages!” I don’t remember when I stopped turning Javascript off in browsers. I certainly found many of the Javascript based applications (e.g., various Web based mail apps, Google maps fer sure, some reasoner interfaces etc.) useful, compelling, and much more friendly than an Java applet or webstart (though not always!) and certainly better than Firefox/Mozilla XUL based apps (i.e., the experience didn’t seem substantively worse, it was sometimes better, and it had better installation/cross-browser behavior).

But my heart never warmed to all this. It still seemed better for Web applications rather than Web content—I certainly didn’t like having to use Javascript rather than some elements or CSS to do simple things like hide/show, more/less text. Exhibit touched me, but I ended up punting on S5 for a while, in spite of some early success, because of printing and math issues. I was intrigued by the use of Javascript libraries to bring HTML 5 features to legacy browsers. We could be living in the future!

And it was a bit of Javascript mediated future that has won me over…the inexpressibly wonderful jsMath library.

The only way I can really indicate how cool I find the prospect of being able to enter equations user LaTeX and have them render properly in any browser with clean resizing and the source intact is to say that finding jsMath completely displaced all my iPhone lust. All of it. I’m not saying I’d turn down an iPhone if you handed me one, but jsMath has the same sort of elegance.

I can have math in the browser! And it works! Without upgrading the browser or fighting MathML.

It’s not living in the future; it’s living in a better past.

Or not so much?

JavaFX...Silverlight...the more venerable Flash (will Apollo take off?), AJAX (“soon” with HTML5?), and Java applets…

So much hype! But, in point of fact, most of the tech is pretty interesting. (See JavaFX Script and the DLR for just two examples).

Of course, if I were to go into Grumpy Old Bypassed Minority Tech person, I’d whinge on and on about how Squeak blew this space. Though, Squeak is doing ok enough, what with OLPC and Scratch. We definitely ought to have hosted a Python and a Javascript implementation, at the very least. Of course, Peter Fisk is doing some pretty damn interesting work bringing Lisp and Smalltalk and their environments. It is the environments that I miss the most. I’d take a Hypercard like system anyday of the week!

Alas, I’m a bit skeptical that all this means we’ll get radically more usable apps overall. It’s possible, I suppose. I do hope it makes effective experimentation with new presentation and interaction techniques much easier.