Re: [xml-dev] Open Platform

>Henri Sivonen asked: what do you mean by an open platform?

(Sorry for breaking the thread, I hit the delete key too fast)

In broad terms, I mean a platform that allows anyone to implement new 
software to run on that platform, without unreasonable restrictions. As 
a minimum, that includes the provision of a virtual machine which can be 
reasonably used as a target for compiling or interpreting a wide range 
of programming languages and their run-time libraries. And despite 
Google's heroic efforts with GWT, I don't think Javascript qualifies as 
such a VM. Having to implement 64-bit integer arithmetic by software 
emulation using a pair of doubles is just too convoluted; and the 
concurrency model seems to be pretty limiting too.

Security restrictions in terms of what resources are accessible are of 
course reasonable, though as far as I can see the cross-site-scripting 
rules seem to be about as relevant to the real threat model as the 
theatrical checks performed in airport security halls.

Michael Kay
Saxonica