Professional HTML5 Mobile Game Development

Introduction

The most significant barrier, in the pre-Ajax days, to JavaScript becoming a viable platform for interactive cross-browser application development was the subtle differences between the various browsers. Inconsistent implementations of assorted features across the various browsers (with Internet Explorer being particularly guilty) meant that to interact with a web page, developers needed to know the ins and outs of each browser and modify their code to handle the different incompatible implementations. Combine this difficulty with the verboseness of manipulating elements on the page and making asynchronous web calls, and it’s no surprise people viewed JavaScript as a toy compared to what people were doing in Java and Flash. That view began to change as libraries, which made the developer experience more consistent and the JavaScript code more concise, began to gain widespread use.