Why is ECMAScript still not a recommendation of W3C?

Question

In theory browsers could support several programming languages for client-side scripting of web pages. In practice, ECMAScript is the only one widely implemented and used in all browsers. So for most people, it is an integral part of the web.

However, it has never been promoted as a recommendation by the W3C for web page scripting. And HTML5 does seems to promote it either, even though client-side interactivity is becoming more and more important. Why it is the case?

• Is it to prevent a programming language monopoly on the web platform? (obviously failed)
• Is it because the W3C prefers to concentrate ONLY on the declarative side of the web?
• Or simply a political stance?

Answer 1

I'll take a stab at this: W3C tries to draft and recommend standards. ECMAscript is already a standard, from ECMA. It doesn't need to re-ratify the language.

Something close to this is the w3c's attempts to standardize the document object model (DOM) by which all browsers interact with a HTML page using javascript/ecmascript (or vbscript or any other client-side scripting language.) This hasn't actually been smooth sailing tbh, but it's better than nothing (so they keep telling me)

http://www.w3.org/DOM/

-Oisin