Colin Putney wrote on Thu, 14 Apr 2005 21:13:13 -0400
> I don't think Java is necessary - the number of sites that use applets 
> these days is vanishingly small.

In Brazil the government is making an effort to covert all the little
applications you need to "talk" to it from Windows executable to Java.
Not quite consistent with their open source policy, but Linux and Mac
users are much happier. These are actually applications, not applets,
but I sometimes browse the web without having Java installed and for now
the inconvenience is great enough to be worth trying to deal with it.
 
> Javascript would be easier than you might think. At my day job, we have 
> a Javascript runtime for VW that's pretty close to fully compliant with 
> ECMA-262. It has good interoperability between Smalltalk and 
> Javascript, and you can debug and inspect Javascript objects using the 
> regular Smalltalk tools. It's fast and robust - we use it in our 
> production code, and have lots of users writing scripts for it. It's 
> available as open source.

I would be surprised if it were hard since it is a rather simple little
language. But given all the problems different versions of Netscape and
IE browsers had with it, there seemed to be some complication that I was
missing.

> We already have Flash support. It will probably need to be updated for 
> newer versions of Flash and so on.

If I remember correctly, Squeak implements Flash 3. It seems that
version 5 is the most used currently, but I haven't paid much attention
to this.
 
> I think the hardest thing about a browser would be the HTML/CSS layout 
> stuff.

Yes, and I would say it would actually be impossible if it will only be
done in someone's spare time. If done as a *serious* effort (actually
hiring someone) then it would still be hard but wouldn't be something I
would be too worried about.

But about the "laptop team", I am finishing another project and plan to
dedicate time to this proposal as soon as I am done with that (in about
a week, I hope). I just wanted to get the ball rolling early to give
people time to think about it and see if there is interest.

-- Jecel