Professional, JavaScript® for Web Developers, Second Edition

Foreword

JavaScript, for much of its existence, has been the subject of fear, invective, disdain, and misunderstanding. In its early years, many "serious programmers" thought that JavaScript wasn't serious enough.

By contrast, many liberal arts majors drafted into web-developer service during the dotcom boom thought JavaScript was mysterious and arcane. Many who had both the tenacity and the patience to fully grok JavaScript as a language were nevertheless frustrated by its inconsistent implementation across competing browsers. All of these factors helped lead to a proliferation of awkward and poorly conceived scripts. And, through the extraordinary openness of front-end code on the Web, a lot of bad habits were copied from one site and pasted into the source of another. Thus JavaScript's bad reputation as a language, which was generally ill-deserved, became intertwined with a deservedly bad reputation surrounding its implementations.

Around 2001 (with the release of Internet Explorer 6), improved browser implementations and improving practice in web development began to converge. The XMLHttpRequest object at the heart of Ajax was slowly being discovered, and a new paradigm of desktop-style user interaction was emerging within the browser. The DOM APIs that allowed JavaScript to manipulate the structure and content of web documents had solidified. CSS, for all the contortions, omissions, and the willful insanity of its implementations by browser vendors, had progressed far enough ...