I haven’t tried Processing. I hear it’s nice and have seen a few good pieces done with it. Not many–mostly very casual work and/or work of small dimensions. Also, I have worked quite hard to create windowing for Shockwave apps. I wrote some behaviors for windowing and so forth at http://vispo.com/wfs4 . Windowing and controls and dynamic sprite creation/destruction. And the graphic manipulation in Director is fairly deluxe.

Yes, cross-browser stuff in Javascript is still, in some cases, a headache. Mind you, it isn’t the complete disaster it was in the days of less cross-browser compatibility. Trying to create cross-browser Javascript used to be an absurd process.

I haven’t used Perl or PHP or Python. I hear Perl is deluxe concerning string handling and you confirm it.

Concerning the beauty of programming languages, I take an un-beautiful approach. I look at it in terms of the features offered, how extensive the APIs are concerning text and multimedia, how well it works on the web, whether exe’s can be deployed on different types of computers, that sort of thing.

Also, whether dynamic creation/destruction of anything at all is robustly supported, whether there are robust and general container classes, whether OOP is supported, that sort of thing.

I don’t care how you have to say it in the language or how flexible it is that way. What most concerns me is the range simply of what you can do at all. I don’t so much think in any of these languages as in what I want them to do and how I want them to look or sound or behave.

Though, when I think about it, what ends up happening is you figure out what it can do and then you take that as far as it can go. Rather than simply having something in mind and getting it to do that. Though that happens too.

So I guess I do think in those languages. We go back and forth that way, too, don’t we. Our work is both limited by and partially inspired by the limitations and range of the language. Though we also think outside the language about what we want to do. “Can this be done in language x?”. We think about that as well as “what sort of trouble can I get up to in language x?”

Your list of things you don’t like about JavaScript is fascinating, because it doesn’t overlap with my list at all. From my standpoint, it wouldn’t hurt to have better facilities for graphics and sound. I like Processing, for instance. But my own practice is not very visual or sound-relate; I’m mainly concerned with text and computation.

My problem is that when it comes to manipulating the DOM, JavaScript offers you several ways to do things – most of them wrong. I don’t mind having several ways to do things (I use Perl a lot) but when some are very expedient but don’t work well across browsers, it’s a problem.

And, I generally find JavaScript crufty. You can use a sort of top-level by firing up Firefox and the error console, or Firebug, but it’s not like having the Python interpreter. The facilities for manipulating text are not nearly as good as in Perl and not as good as in Python. Both languages seem more systematic and let me do things with text more easily, without worrying about unnecessary overhead. I prefer these languages as tools to think with. But if I want people to see the computer working, it’s pretty straightforward to point them at a Web page where some JavaScript is running.

There are various things, though, that Javascript should have but doesn’t.

The audio API is minuscule.

Graphics don’t have quads.

You can’t fill a graphic on the fly or draw into it at all. You can’t do other ops on graphics either like rotate them or skew them or flip them. You can’t sample from them.

Texts can’t have gradients or fills other than a single color.

There’s no masking.

There’s no native 3D.

And there are countless other features that Javascript doesn’t offer that justify the existence of plugins like Shockwave, Flash, Java, and so forth.

But Javascript is good for all sorts of things. It’s particularly well-suited to the sort of work we associate with ‘electronic literature’. The string handling is good. The paradigm is that of a document (not a ‘movie’ like in Director and Flash). It does offer OOP. It connects well with servers and probably peer-to-peer also. It isn’t proprietary and neither is the work made with it, normally. It’s going to be around for quite a while. It’s in the hands of the W3C consortium.

There’s much to be said in its favor.

Here is an interesting article about Javascript and OOP that Ted Warnell sent me yesterday: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc163419.aspx

I’m hoping to learn cross-browser OOP for Javascript for various reasons. But mostly so I can create and manage elements on the fly, which I note you’re doing in “Two”.

There’s a kind of literary appeal to that sort of dynamic creation/destruction of the elements of the document. But it’s also good for programming reasons.

When I am working in JavaScript, I like Firebug, and I also find jslint very handy.

did you study javascript, nick, or pick it up on your own?

i’ve started using a couple of javascript debuggers recently. firebug for firefox and one for ie i think microsoft made. and that has somehow gotten me interested in looking at javascript more.

To mention some about where I was coming from, now that there’s a conversation: I wanted to create a story where the referents of pronouns (whether they are both male, both female, or one male and one female) are not explicit, so that in order to determine who is doing what to whom we are compelled to rely on our assumptions about gender, power relations, and suggestions of syntax. This is meant to throw into relief that, at least in the U.S. today as I understand it, people usually assume that librarians are female, indigents are male, police officers are male, alleged perpetrators are male, and so on.

I wonder how this would play to an audience which had never seen any digital literature before? I think the effect should be about the same really.

My only criticism would be that when the page is full to the bottom, all the “stanzas” nip upwards so quickly and imperceptibly when a new one loads that you still think you’re reading the old one when it’s actually turned into a new one.

- Edward

The piece reads well, Scott (you mean Nick… JN). It has a subtle, erm, cosmic element to it. Evoking a kind of narrative combinatorium universe.

I think the simplicity of the piece is a real strength. The piece doesn’t get in its own way. Heavily textual dynamic literary material, on the net, usually doesn’t work well for me: I find most of it unreadable.

Also, the appearance is good. Simple. Readable. Like a simple poemy poem but it isn’t a simple poemy poem.

The event engine is metaphorical of the dynamo.