A new computer language, touted as the lingua franca of the World-Wide Web by software developers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), could displace the Windows and Unix operating systems in a new era of Web-centric computing.
Curl is designed to cope with simple HTML (hypertext mark-up language) commands and scale up to object-oriented programming. It was built to remove the barriers of learning the new Web compiling and programming technologies needed as Web-masters increase their skills, moving from basic text publishing to complex content.
Professor Steve Ward, of MIT's laboratory for computer science, demonstrated Curl at a seminar in Hong Kong last week.
He described it as a single linguistic substrate to allow content to be transferred across all computing platforms.
Curl is labelled a gentle slope system, accessible to content creators at all skill levels ranging from novice Web authors to experienced programmers.
By using uniform language syntax, Curl avoids the problems experienced by Web users who now have to juggle HTML, JavaScript, Java and Perl to create sites.