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Microsoft is finding more and more ways to distract Web developers from Java. The latest effort is called "scriptlets," a synthesis of HTML and scripting languages that creates reusable components for building Web pages and applications.
Microsoft hopes the technology will lead to more use of Dynamic HTML on the Web and make life easier for designers who will be able to incorporate more pre-built, lightweight, and reusable components on their sites.
"It will make pages much smaller and more maintainable," said Scott Isaacs, a product manager at Microsoft. "This closes the loop on what you would want to do with HTML and scripting."
Developers will be able to create scriptlets using HTML 4.0 in combination with a variety of scripting languages, but other companies will have to build support in browsers and applications to run the scriptlets. Interfaces that control the behavior of the objects can be built to help users and developers manipulate them in other applications.
Like images on a Web page, scriptlets will download once and are then cached. Among other things, scriptlets could be used to replace Java applets that perform simple interactive operations or create complex, moving displays and layouts.
Simon Phipps, IBM's chief Java evangelist and program manager, pointed out that extending HTML through the object tag creates a proprietary and potentially dangerous technology.
"This is pretty trivial stuff and I don't like the way they've implemented it," he said. "They are polluting HTML with something proprietary, and the big problem is that there's a risk that inside these objects there could be something ugly lurking — COM references or ActiveX objects, for instance."
The new technology will be supported in Microsoft's Internet Explorer 4.0 - due 30 September - and development tools including the company's forthcoming FrontPage HTML editor and the InterDev Web 98 development tool. Whether the search engine companies will support searching of scriptlet files is, as of yet, unclear, but scriptlets will be supported by tools vendors including Macromedia, Acadia software, Elemental Software, ExperTelligence, and Powersoft.
