A longer chat with Mr. Ingalls

Dan was gracious enough to entertain a discussion about his new project --- besides the work he's doing at Sun.

He would like to mount a new and refactored framework for authoring visual content over a standardized language (e.g.: Javascript), so the following goals can be achieved:

1. Make a uniform web content authoring platform, instead of all this aggregation of different technologies one on top of the other (http, css, flash, graphics, layout, floating objects, etc etc etc) --- which raise the creativity tax for no good reason.
2. Make this thing run independently of the web browser. All of a sudden, all your UI painters become easier to deal with --- and you get consistent cross platform results inside and outside Explorer, Firefox, etc.
3. Make creation of content easy for everybody.
   

Ian's talk at the Dynamic Language Symposium, in particular the claim that with no optimization a self-bootstrapping implementation of Javascript was faster than Firefox makes so much sense. But then, there is this guy that got hired by Google to make fast Javascript implementations, so who knows. Intrigue, intrigue...