There are probably few among us who would argue with the following statement: Javascript is an aging language badly in need of modernization. To that end, developers and industry folks have been hard at work on ECMAScript 4, the next-generation JavaScript dialect. While that's certainly good news in and of itself, there are a number of different cooks in this kitchen, with differing views of what direction ECMAScript 4 should take. On one side, there's Microsoft and Yahoo, both of who argue that increasing the complexity of the existing language is not the right way to go--they believe that the focus should remain on improving ECMAScript 3 and that modern scripting functionality should be provided by a totally different language. On the other side we've got folks like Mozilla and Adobe, who think that ECMAScript needs a full overhaul, while preserving backward-compatibility with old code. Is there a way forward? Ars Technica thinks that there might be: a solution that bridges the gap between the two camps.

For more on the Javascript war:
- see this Ars Technica article