This piece of news seems to have gone largely unnoticed by the community—so thanks to Colin Moock for pointing it out. ECMA has announced, that a new extension for the 4th generation of ECMAScript has been agreed upon. The new standard, E4X (or ECMAScript for XML) will standardarized, vendor-neutral programming syntax for adding native XML support to the ECMAScript language.
I was pretty excited when I first read this news, but after reading the article by John Schneider, I'm not so sure I'm found of the idea. I think I like the idea of a generic DOM model much better. The new syntax looks clunky to me and doesn't feel like a natural extension to ECMAScript (which what JavaScript has become.) John claims the code is "simpler, more compact, and more familiar to the average programmer..." I don't know that I agree with that. It looks like a pretty strange, foreign syntax to me. However, that example may not be good example. I look forward to seeing more on this. Lord know I'd love the browsers to come up w/a standardized XML DOM API.
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