Chapter 12. Javascript and The Browser

“The browser is a really hostile programming environment.”

—Douglas Crockford, The JavaScript Programming Language (video lecture)

The next part of this book will talk about web browsers. Without web browsers, there would be no JavaScript. And even if there were, no one would ever have paid any attention to it.

Web technology has, from the start, been decentralized, not just technically but also in the way it has evolved. Various browser vendors have added new functionality in ad hoc and sometimes poorly thought out ways, which then sometimes ended up being adopted by others and finally set down as a standard.

This is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, it is empowering to not have a central ...

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