At 11:44 +0000 1998/12/15, Sebastian Rahtz wrote:
>why do you think there is an intermediate language? Netscape under
>Windows, say, reads a CSS spec, and renders it by internal calls to
>the underlying Windows GDI. there is no hook there which you can
>attach to.

Right. And on Mac's, one might use QuickDraw. These are the underlying
hooks, of course. Just make them machine independent, as a byte-code.

> > display information. Turn that more basic language into a byte code; then
>what is this obsession with "byte codes"??

I don't know; is there an obsession about byte-codes?

I know that byte-codes are used to provide machine independent compiler
instructions. This is feasible if the CPU is suffiently powerful.

If you are interested in running software only on Microsofts OS, then you
do not need byte-codes.

>I suspect you'd be better off using a nice graphical markup language
>like PGML or Microsoft's equivalent (--> SVG, when W3C complete their
>work).

I suspect that this is wrong: These langugaes are on a too high level.

Confer the development with Java & JVM: On top of the byte-code language,
one may build other languages, like frp example Pizza, which extends Java
by adding classes with parameters and stuff.

The thing is that a sufficiently low level graphical definition low level
can be put into the OS (just as the JVM starts to be integrated into
OS'es), and one can not expect that to happen with the more high level
languages (as it is going to be too slow).

  Hans Aberg
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