[Techtalk] why is Active X in web pages evil, but not Perl/PHP/Javascript?

[Mary]

On Wed, Jan 19, 2005, Almut Behrens wrote:
> IOW, I don't think the problem is client-side scripting per se

Neither do I, but something about Carla's wording suggested a source of
confusion, possibly suggesting that if you get a browser compatibility
problem with client side scripting, the solution is easy: use server
side scripting! But since they actually have different purposes, you
can't solve compatibility problems that way, hence my second mail.

The normal way to solve them, as far as I can tell, is to eventually say
"damn browser incompatibilities, guess I'm going back to plain HTML."
Several Australian banks have had to do this recently. I agree with you
that there's nothing about the idea of client-side scripting that
inevitably makes this happen, but it has happened.

(Aside: The compatibility problems with client side scripting, by the
way, are now so bad that even if you try very hard, full browser
compatibility is difficult to achieve. There is at least still a goodly
set of HTML tags that do basically what you want on all browsers. People
tell me that's just not really true of much Javascript.)

-Mary