Richard Lynch wrote:
> On Thu, July 21, 2005 3:50 pm, Rasmus Lerdorf said:
>
>>I find a lot of this AJAX stuff a bit of a hype. Lots of people have
>>been using similar things long before it became "AJAX". And it really
>
>
> Call me silly, but...
>
> Didn't a LOT of us move a bunch of code to PHP instead of JS because JS
> was so flaky, because browser implementations were so... diverse...,
> because you never knew if the user even *HAD* javascript, really, and you
> just didn't want to rely on it?
>
> Is anybody going to claim that any of the fundamental problems with
> client-side scripting have changed? Got a bridge to sell, too?
>
> If it's just eye-candy, and doesn't matter to the functioning of your
> web-site, go for it.
>
> If you NEED it to work, JS is simply not the right way to go, even with
> today's landscape.
Browser technology has advanced a bit since then. Today we are no
longer dealing with a pseudo-SGML hack called HTML like we were 10 years
ago. Today's web browser is a DOM Tree viewer. In Firefox you can
click on Tools->DOM Inspector and click through the tree of the page you
are on.
The language to manipulate this DOM Tree is Javascript. And yes,
Javascript gets this DOM manipulation right, because it is so closely
integrated with the actual parsing of the tree. If it didn't work, the
browser wouldn't work either. For example, take this JS:
foo = document.getElementById('some_id').value;
This obviously gets the value of the field with some_id. This prods the
same DOM tree with the same code that the browser itself uses when it
wants to know what the value is in a given element of the tree. So at
this level Javascript is fine, and yes, you can count on it working in
all modern browsers. If any of them can't do this, they won't be around
long.
It gets a bit dicier when you try to extend out beyond simple document
manipulation, but that is really no different than trying to push the
boundaries of CSS or trying to get IE to speak CSS2. The bar keeps
getting raised. In my opinion it has been raised well above basic
Javascript for quite a while now.
-Rasmus
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