1. check out webdeveloper.com's javascript section. not only does the page break completely in non-msie browsers because "javascript" has one too many letters for their template, the "examples" look as though they were written five years ago, despite being posted quite recently.

maybe it's just me, but it seems that holding a domain name like "webdeveloper.com" comes with great responsibility...which I don’t feel they're quite living up to.

Posted at 5:48AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Steve

2. Erm... the thing is that DHTML *is* hard for right-hemisphere-dominant folks (e.g., creatives). who may quickly grok any aspect of art direction but are completely lost the moment they see anything with mixed case, brackets, and tabs. (God forbid they should ever be called upon to modify Perl, a task I usually satisfy by starting with an empty editor and all of the PHP knowledge at my disposal.)

Since the resource cited is on Lockergnome, I have a sneaking suspicion that the voice used is that of someone who's primarily a writer suggesting to the (previously familiar only with WYSIWYG) reader "hey, this is something you oughtta check out, now don't get too scared and run away."

Posted at 5:48AM on Dec 19th 2005 by ben

3. As a so called "right-hemisphere-dominant folk" I take exception to the the statement "that DHTML *is* hard for right-hemisphere-dominant folks" -- at least in my case. CamelCasingTextIs what I do for a living as a developer, in addition to brackets and tabbing... I don't think DHTML is hard at all, the difficulty used to be the fact that Netscape and MSIE implemented distinctly different object models. To effectivly implement anything dynamic meant knowing what borwser the user was on, and running one of two scripts accordingly. Even today the models between Mozilla and IE are different, but they are closer now than they have ever been. It makes it easier to do cross-browser client coding.

I do use DHTML, and I do make sure that it's cross-borwser compatible. Is it a pain? Sure, but it doesn't take much.

TG

Posted at 5:48AM on Dec 19th 2005 by TechGnome

4. Steve, yes, I do have webdeveloper.com as one of my RSS feeds, but as you note, they haven't had anything (lately, at least) worth pointing out. Given that it's 2004, there's just not a lot of novices saying, "Hey! I hear that Web development is a growing field, and I think that I'll start learning it now so I can make good money!" Consequently, I tend to skip the beginner level pieces, because I think that they were written well enough in the late 90's, and the true basics haven't changed much.

Ben, I've been writing about and teaching JavaScript to primarily those right-brain folks since 1997, and I have to say, I don't think that creatives have as much trouble as you think they do. I found that they had the hardest time learning HTML in the first place ("What? I don't have complete & absolute control over how & where things will display???") and once they got past that, JavaScript was maybe not simple, but at least straightforward.

Another thing to keep in mind is that the state of the art has changed dramatically from what it used to be (which is why this article is such an anachronism). DHTML isn't as hard as it was, because a lot of wonderful, talented people are letting us use the tools and workarounds they've developed and made available to the public. Which is why I pointed out the Learn resource, which links to a great number of great pieces (including templates!).

And TechGnome pointed out another way things have improved, in that both Netscape/Mozilla and IE support the W3C DOM. That makes things considerably (an understatement) easier than back in the bad old days when the Netscape DOM and the MS DOM were radically different.

Posted at 5:48AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Dori Smith