Re: Client-Side Scripts & Web Scripting languages

Luke (ylu@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu)
Fri, 24 Mar 95 22:16:19 EST

On Fri, 24 Mar 1995, Brian Behlendorf wrote:
>Guys, the war's over. <URL:http://java.sun.com/>. Now if someone could

Yeah. Straight from their white paper: "Java: A simple, object-oriented,
distributed, interpreted, robust, secure, architecture neutral, portable,
high-performance, multithreaded, and dynamic language...The size of the
basic interpreter and class support is about 40K bytes; adding the basic
standard libraries and thread support (essentially a self-contained
microkernel) adds an additional 175K..." Sounds like an ultimate language
to me ;) What d'ya think?

The only thing this HotJava thing bothers me so far is their applet
invoking method in their pseudo HTML, which I am pretty sure is not SGML
based, since it's impossible to write a DTD for their APP element. The
general syntax of the APP HTML tag:

<APP CLASS="ClassName"
SRC="URL"
ALIGN=alignment
WIDTH=widthInPixels
HEIGHT=heightInPixels
AppletSpecificAttribute=aValue
...>

They use AppletSpecificAttribute=aValue as an argument passing mechanism,
hence the following SGML choking piece:

<APP CLASS="SpreadSheet"
rows="6" columns="4"
title="Current Stock Position"
A1="lSymbol:"
B1="lPrice:"
C1="l#Shares:"
D1="lSubTotal:"

A2="lNEATO"
B2="v40"
C2="v1000"
D2="fB2*C2"

A3="lWiZBaNg"
B3="v43"
C3="v500"
D3="fB3*C3"

C6="lTotal:"
D6="fD2+D3"
>

Also, the CLASS attribute is semantically conflict with the proposed style
sheet mechanism.

Hey, SGML people act now before it's too late :)

>just write me a perl-to-java converter.....

I think this will be extremely difficult for the same reason why there are
to perl to C/C++ converters...

__Luke

--
Luke Y. Lu
mailto:ylu@mail.utexas.edu/
http://www.utexas.edu/~lyl/