New opportunities for D => ASM.js

[via Digitalmars-d]

On Friday, 16 May 2014 at 19:28:26 UTC, H. S. Teoh via 
Digitalmars-d wrote:
> Today I skimmed over the PDF spec... and was horrified to 
> discover that
> I had been living in a fool's paradise, thinking that it was 
> only a
> passive *document* format. Turns out that it is yet another of 
> those
> document format turned Turing-complete messes. With its own 
> embedded
> flavor of Javascript, even. (And obviously, it's gratuitously
> incompatible with "standard" JS). With the ability to attach 
> files.

Yeah, it is quite messy. I read it a year ago in order to 
generate some PDF files with images, and was surprised by the 
length of the PDF format documentation and getting more than one 
image onto a page takes planning… I get the impression that they 
tried to target Word with all kinds of features for sending in 
forms and what not. The text based format looks like it came from 
the past… Same with HTTP and SMTP. It looks like a telex from the 
1950s. Why on earth did they pick a date format that is so hard 
to parse, not to mention all the plain wrong uses of said format 
that you also have to parse. HTML5 is great in comparison!

IT tech has always been driven by: ease of installation, ease of 
getting started, and if not, the ease of getting a hackish 
implementation on it's feet (this is HTTP). Then evolve from that.

As a contrast SVG is actually pretty clean. A bit too complex 
perhaps and the integration with HTML is poor. Actually MS' VML 
had better integration… Postscript was cool, but could be slow.