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JAVASCRIPT AND THE BROWSER
The next chapters of this book will discuss web browsers. Without browsers, there would be no JavaScript— or if there were, no one would ever have paid any attention to it.
Web technology has been decentralized from the start, not just technically but also in terms of the way it evolved. Various browser vendors have added new functionality in ad hoc and sometimes poorly thought-out ways, which were then—sometimes—adopted by others, and finally set down in standards.
This is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, it is empowering to not have a central party control a system but have it be improved by various parties working in loose collaboration (or occasionally, open hostility). On the other hand, the haphazard ...
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