HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
of JavaScript, DOM manipulation, and CSS (e.g., making web pages with
snowflakes that float on top of them).
Soon, JavaScript became much more popular and, in the hands of serious
developers with experience in enterprise software development in languages
such as Java and C/C++, JavaScript matured. However, browsers were
inconsistent in implementation; JavaScript developers often coded in hatred,
knowing that other browsers' implementation of Ajax/XMLHttpRequest was
completely different to the then-popular Internet Explorer (the opposite of what
we see today). Even simple tasks such as binding events or selecting elements
could be a pain, as you had to do them twice----
-once for Internet Explorer and
once for everybody else.
We later got libraries such as MooTools, DoJo, JQuery, and YUI to take a lot of
the heavy lifting away from us. These did away with many of the browser
inconsistencies by providing one method for us to use to perform simple tasks
(such as DOM selection and manipulation), which worked across all browsers.
For example, rather than writing several lines of code to create an Ajax request
that was compatible with both Internet Explorer and Firefox, you could cover
both at once with jQuery, as follows.
$.ajax('/my/data/provider.json');
What this unfortunately left us with was a group of new developers who had
every right to believe that jQuery, DoJo, MooTools, or YUI was true
JavaScript-----because that's the way they were taught or self-taught.
Procedural JavaScript mixed with library code became the norm, and cramming
$(document).ready(function(){});
with spaghetti code would eventually
become hard to maintain for growing web applications.
These tools are amazing and powerful, but it's easy to become reliant on them
and not understand how they really work and why you should or shouldn't use
one or the other for mobile. If you primarily work with jQuery, then that's great. I
have been working with jQuery as a developer since 2007/version 1.1, and
script.aculo.us (although I hate to admit it) since 2005. However, I learned
JavaScript first, and I looked through jQuery and script.aculo.us's code before I
even began to use it.
This is even more important in mobile, as the majority of the code found in the
libraries will be barely used by your mobile web application. At a minimum, you
might potentially use DOM selectors, traversal, event binding, and Ajax, which
accounts for a small percentage of the libraries code. That said, it doesn't make
sense to pull the whole thing down a network that's already struggling with
supply and demand.
