I ran across a blog entry from Jeff Atwood at Coding Horrors this morning talking about my favorite programming language, javascript. Traditionally, javascript has the reputation of being a ‘toy’ language. But that has changed:
Regardless of your original feelings towards the language, JavaScript has come a long way since the bad old days of 1995. We’ve got CPU power to burn on the client; so much power, in fact, that even an interpreted, dynamic language like JavaScript can be a credible client-side development environment. The language has been standardized…so there’s now a reasonable expectation of compatibility across browsers.
Jeff goes on to call MS Silverlight, Adobe Flash, Adobe Flex and Sun JavaFX “pretenders to the throne”. He says (emphasis from the orginal article):
JavaScript is the lingua franca of the web. Ignore it at your peril.
Microsoft threw down the gantlet last month by first declaring the browser wars over, then a few days later, announcing that they were challenging Flash for the crown of plug-in king. The browser wars have morphed into the plug-in wars. And it’s a war certain to heat up when Microsoft releases the next version of Internet Explorer.
Do you remember the days of websites announcing “This site best viewed on <browser>”? And if you did want to be a conscience website builder, you had to go to great lengths to support (or avoid) all of the different proprietary HTML extensions. We’re heading down that road again. But this time it’s going to be the great plug-in war.
The nature of web has shifted. Content is more dynamic everyday. It is tempting to grab onto Flash as the best was to make the web experience more dynamic. But if you want to avoid the same kind of painful experiences of the browser wars, avoid relying on plug-ins to provide dynamic content. Javascript has evolved into a powerful and ubiquitous programming language. Every major browser installs with javascript running and ready to go.
So make your site immune to the coming plug-in wars. Don’t forget that javascript remains a powerful choice for building a rich-content web site.
Ken Heutmaker recently started a site called sizzleWithoutFlash. It provides links to resources and libraries to help web developers build rich sites using Javascript.