Scripting in the 21st Century
October 26th 3 commentsI love scripting.
I - like most web designers - have spent many hours viewing source on pages that have nifty script trickery. I’ve always loved that one can learn JavaScript just by stealing (read: borrowing) other people’s code. (That’s probably why I’ve never bothered learning Flash.)
Back in the early days scripting was used mainly for rollovers and form validation. Back then it was all you needed. Everything was new and undiscovered. People weren’t thinking about accessibility or standards, we just wanted to be able to make that image over there change when you moused over some text over here. For me it was about getting my website to do what that other webdeveloper’s websites did. One my favorite sites was bratta.com (now defunct, but there is a back up here). I would spend hours and hours trawling through his code trying to figure out how the fuck he did it! As you’ll see if you go to the above URL most of the scripting is now completely useless.
Now days people are using scripts for far smarter things. The days of whizz-bang are over. Scripts are now used to enhance usability and the user experience. Applications like GMail, Flickr and Basecamp use a fair amount of JavaScript, and a lot of the time you don’t even notice. This is how it should be. JavaScript is the subtlety added to web interfaces. Things like the ‘yellow fade technique‘ and plugging new elements onto the DOM are the way to go these days. Less is more.
So, now that I’ve been rambling for a scroll or two it’s probably about time I cough up some documentation and linkage. I’ve broken the links down into four sections: Documentation; Libraries; Blogs; and The Others.
Documentation
JavaScript documentation is rare and quite unusable…but I’ve managed to find a few gems:
- JScript reference - this is Microsoft’s scripting reference. It’s not standard but many of the JScript Object Model is identical to the JavaScript Object Model
- W3C’s ECMA script binding reference
- Mozilla JavaScript documentation
- Webreference.com’s Documentation
Libraries
These libraries are mainly JavaScript libraries, some have a stronger focus on AJAX, however.
- Prototype
- Scriptaculous
- Dojo
- MochiKit
- Rico
- DynAPI (teh originator!)
- NEW - Moo.Fx - based on prototype.
Blogs
The Others
These are links I couldn’t categorise…
- JavaScript: The World’s Most Misunderstood Programming Language
- CBL Partial Updater - PHP AJAX thing. Very easy to implement and use.
- AJAX:Getting Started
- SAJAX - another PHP AJAX thing
So that’s all I have for the time being. If you know of any awesome links I’ve left out please add to the comment form.
Nice collection of links! It’s probably about high time I get my feet wet with AJAX and all, so this is rather well timed for me. I agree with you about the nature of Javascript changing to be more user-focussed. The way that it can enhance a user experience, particularly when used with forms or for editing fields, just makes the whole process so much nicer (e.g. editing Flickr titles and info). I’m just waiting to get my hands on a nice CMS that makes use of it all. Know of any?
Thanks! Could be useful. How much I ought to know and how little I actually know is making me feel sick.
At work today in the midst of multiple projects and a huge to-do list I have to think about blah blah web mapping application development blah blah… I’m sure I should know more about ajax than it is an asynchronous java-something-something-maybexhtml? ;) I wonder if the awareness that it exists is enough.
Excellent article.
I got more involved int the back end side of things so wasn’t too concerned with all this front-end malarky but now it seems that javascriping has come into its own.
The last project I worked on in the UK required a shedload of javascript so I was thrown into the deepend.
I fell in love with javascript purely because its so versitile
and fairly easy to use once you get your head around the DOM