October 2006
Beginner to intermediate
352 pages
9h 33m
English
Content preview from Learning JavaScriptBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Something Old, Something New
The title of this section is from that old wedding rhyme about what a Western bride carries on her wedding day:
Something old, something new; something borrowed, something blue
Old, new, borrowed, and blue are all adjectives that can be used to describe the experience of creating applications that move between the different levels of the DOM, or from the BOM to the newer DOM.
Many of the existing JavaScript libraries or sample scripts still use technologies that worked with the old 4.x browsers popular in the late 1990s. With IE 4.x and Navigator 4.x, JavaScript and DHTML really took off, so it’s not surprising that much of these older scripts are still easily available. Particularly since many of them still work.
Today, modern browsers such as IE, Firefox, Mozilla, Navigator, Opera, Safari, Camino, and others adhere to the W3C as much as possible. I emphasize the last phrase because it has a great deal of meaning in cross-browser and cross-version web-page development. The possibilities are limited by how widespread the use of some technologies are. For instance, Microsoft’s newer IE 7 supports the newer DOM, up to the point where support would mean breaking older web pages. The company isn’t necessarily ready to break backward compatibility, and though not doing so is a pain for web developers, it’s also somewhat understandable.
So modern browsers borrow some of the older implementations, as well as support the newer. Developers use a variety of tests to ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.