As I write this web-site with 2012 almost upon us, HTML5 is a curious beast. It’s been around in some form or another for a couple of years now, but it wasn’t that long ago that the XHTML 2.0 progress was halted, which made HTML5 the de facto next standard for Web development.
When I first began doing Web development, I had no appreciation of an HTML page’s document type declaration, aka DOCTYPE. I believe I was using HTML 3.2 at the time, and only understood that meant pages must begin with:
In starting a new endeavor, whether it’s learning JavaScript for the first time or learning better, more modern JavaScript techniques, one ought to have a sense of the goals before starting out. The purpose of a Web site, of course, is for it to be viewable and usable by clients—end users with their Web browsers.
As already stated, the core of JavaScript comes from ECMAScript, which is currentlyin version 5 as of 2009. The most current version of JavaScript, based upon ECMAScript 5, is JavaScript 1. 8. 5, which came out in July of 2010.
If you’re reading this book, you presumably have an interest in learning JavaScript,but I’d be remiss if I didn’t also present my thoughts as to why JavaScript is a GoodThing. The most important and obvious reason is that JavaScript is useful. A largeswath of the dynamic functionality that’s normal in today’s Web sites is accomplishedusing JavaScript.
Now that you have an understanding of what JavaScript is (hopefully), let’s take a minute to talk about what JavaScript isn’t. This could also be called the “Myth Busters” section of the chapter!First, JavaScript is not Java. This is a common point of confusion and reasonably so (they both start with “Java,” after all). But, no, JavaScript is not Java.
JavaScript is, technically speaking, an object-oriented, weakly typed, scriptinglanguage. One could toss more jargon into this definition, but those are the mostcritical aspects of the language. Let’s look at them in detail. First, JavaScript is an object-oriented programming language, as opposed to aprocedural one. This distinction has several implications.
