Javascript is a Good Thing ™
Monday / 27 June 05
I was invited by Faruk Ates to join a get-together focusing on Javascript in the 21st century. Yesterday was that day and with over a dozen people including Anne van Kesteren, Peter-Paul Koch, Bobby van der Sluis and of course Faruk himself, we stuck our heads together in Amsterdam.
Javascript’s image
Why? @media 2005 showed there’s a need to promote modern Javascript. Tell the world Javascript isn’t bad and we’ve passed the time of “Attack of the Useless DHTML Effects” and annoying Javascript errors rendering the website completely useless. This bad reputation is still one of the main reasons for people not looking into using Javascript. Sounds easy, right? Well, continuing the discussion it showed it will be anything but that.
The audience
Understanding your audience is key to a strategy, so who are these people? Who do we want to communicate with? Peter-Paul Koch came to the get-together well prepared and started off with defining the following people:
- A visual or interaction designer familiar with (the concepts of) CSS and semantic markup.
- An old-school Javascript programmer.
- An application developer developing web-based applications or web-related authoring tools.
While the complete definition of each person is still very open for interpretation, their way of looking (or lack of) at Javascript and the ways to approach them are unique for each group. So, how do we add to this international effort of turning Javascript into a Good Thing ™ again?
Communication and documentation
Simply put: lead by example. Due to a lack of proper documentation as well as communication a lot of people refrain from exploring Javascript or worse, start off wrong right away. The first thing we asked ourselves was: what is modern Javascript? Modern Javascript is unobtrusive allowing for either progressive enhancement of the user experience or graceful degradation in any case Javascript is not enabled. Is that all? I tend to think it isn’t, but like web standards being a good starting point for accessibility, I have to agree that, right now, unobtrusive Javascript is the best starting point for modern Javascript.
Communicating theoritical bla-bla is nice, but it won’t get us much closer to completing the set goals. We can’t forget that the designers want something useful and visually pleasing, whereas the old-school programmers need clear and well implemented examples to understand the benefits. Content and lots of it. Tutorials showing small snippets of modern Javascript aiming to, some day, replace the horrible sites showing the even more horrible Javascript we had to deal with in the past couple of years.
Finally, documentation. In my early efforts of working with modern Javascript I was shocked to see the incredible lack of proper documentation. Call me spoiled by PHP’s excellent documentation, but I just had a hard time finding the right (and non-proprietary, credible looking) resources.
More issues requiring more research
Another set of issues raised were related to accessibility and compatibility. A lot of research needs to be done in terms of support for Javascript on alternative devices, such as screenreaders and PDAs. For example, JAWS only supports inline events, not when they are defined through the DOM. Another point to consider is how to convince the men in suits.
Judging by the length of this article, you can imagine it was one action-packed, creative-flooded and (insert some Hollywood marketing here) get-together. Faruk discusses even more ideas and issues, related to organizational problems, a Javascript-take on the CSS Zen Garden and possibly a new task force.
On another note…
I really enjoyed the get-together — allowing to meet some of the people behind the blogs I read daily, passing back and forth an incredible amount of ideas and questions, with a drink and something to eat.
While some details of the Javascript related discussions went right over my head breaking the sound barrier, I managed to follow, understand the problems and learn a lot from it. I already intended on exploring DOM scripting a lot more and sharing my experiences, but after this get-together, who knows where I’ll end up with.
List of people who attended:
- Faruk Ates (Bringing Javascript to the People)
- Robbert Broersma
- Arjan Geerse
- Tom Greuter (A Day at the Races)
- Richard Groenendijk
- Jules
- Gerbert Kaandorp
- Anne van Kesteren (Javascript for the Masses)
- Peter-Paul Koch (Amsterdam Javascript Meeting)
- Jeroen Mulder
- Bobby van der Sluis (Photoset on Flickr)
- Dejan Tasic
- Thomas Ummels
