Why I don’t use JavaScript

Posted by santosj on January 5, 2006

JavaScript adds to the development time and since I’m not as skilled it adds even more time as I have to research and test what I write for both Firefox and IE. Firefox (Mozilla) usually doesn’t give me any problems, but adding support for IE is what drives the development time even further. It would be easier to say I’m not going to support IE, but then I lose a great deal of my base for that feature, depending on what it is. A lot of the time, I don’t use JavaScript because I have no real need for it. Why do I need to spend the time learning something that I won’t use but 10% of the time. When I do need it, I have to learn how to do what I need to use it for. I was greatly interested in how they do a lot of the advanced stuff, but I realized that it was only high novice to low intermediate coding and I was the novice who didn’t understand.

When you spend over eight years learning HTML and only then know about 90% and then teach yourself how to use PHP for three years, you don’t really have time for a lot of other stuff. If I ever sat down and read a book and did the examples in the book, then I could try some experiments. My problem is that I want to do stuff now and learning stuff from examples and from the ground up wasn’t very interesting. If I had actually taken the time to learn all I could, then I could probably create something that was moderately complex without having to do a lot of research.

I may finally break down and learn JavaScript 2.0 or 1.5, if JS 2.0 takes too long to be implemented in IE. I mean from the ground up, reading almost every detail and getting to be intimate with almost every aspect with the language. I must also say that I never really learned DOM 1.0 spec or the DOM 2.0 spec. It is part my difficultly with JavaScript is not the language, but the browser DOM support. If I can find a complete JS 1.5 or 2.0 language book that gives the complete DOM 1.0 and/or 2.0 spec, then maybe I would have an easier chance finally learning the complete language and creating something that is truely useful instead of tiny helper snippets for simple projects.

One of the things that I’m going to do that is going to be extremely difficult for me is getting my hands dirtly with an advanced part of JS and DOM and a lot of what I code won’t be mine, but pieced together from examples. I will also be trying to learn JS 1.5 from online examples and reference guides. That has almost never worked out well, since I can’t really learn without a book in my hand and forced to read the contents. It gets boring and I move on to other parts of the Web when I finally get bored.

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