JavaScript was dead; long live JavaScript. It turns out that the death
certificate was a bit premature. OK, I did experiment with it
occasionally. I use it to build tables of content on large documents,
and to display metadata. There was good stuff for sorting tables and
handling data in forms. But, a few years ago, most applications of
JavaScript I'd seen could be characterized as bling. And Flash was the
technology that killed that niche application. There were advocates
of the technology (Simon Willison and Peter-Paul Koch), but they were
easy to dismiss on several grounds.
- JavaScript was not accessible, or so said the concensus
(and also disputed by JavaScript champions). - Everything you could do on the client side could be done on the
server side with less hassle.
In my view, JavaScript has been a scripting language in search
of a purpose.
What a difference a few years can make. AJAX is the technology that
has brought not just a purpose, but an imperative, to JavaScript.
Ajax brings to web pages a high level of interaction. I won't prattle
about the obvious - most of you use it. For a review, the
article at Wikipedia is a good place to start.
What it means for higher education is that students (especially),
faculty and staff are now accustomed, and reasonably expect, a higher
level of interactivity from their web applications. If we are going to
engage our students, faculty and staff, those expectations
must be met - where appropriate. I am not encouraging gratuitous Web
2.0 functionality. Appropriate is always the operational term and
suggests developers think about priorities.
It also means that JavaScript must now be a basic competancy of web
developers. It's time to rescue those big, fat, yellow JavaScript
Bibles from our dusty bookshelves. It's time to investigate frameworks.
Time to add JavaScript to job descriptions.
Not convinced? Data compiled by the O'Reilly publishing house indicate
that job openings for developers with experience in AJAX is exploding.
Book sales for AJAX development is off the charts. The most
popular sites on the web have refined their user interfaces with
AJAX, and other sites want to catch up with this new technology.
What about concerns about accessibility? Best practice is to minimize
JavaScript in the markup. A style tag that calls an external
JavaScript file is all you need; functionality is added by carefull
use of tag names, IDs and class names used as hooks for function
calls, in a way that is similar to styling with CSS. Accessibility
problems may still exist for AJAX, but the problems are situational
and there are many people looking at broadly applicable solutions -
but there is a yet no concensus.
Who could have guessed a few years ago (uhhh, Willison and Koch
did). JavaScript is now a core technical competancy for web
application developers.
0 comments:
Post a Comment