Day 2 and Session 7 of An Event Apart Chicago 2009 was Eric Meyer demonstrating how important JavaScript has become and will be.
Javascript libraries
- fixing what doesn’t work in old browsers (IE7/IE8.js)
- pushing the envelope of new features (e.g. modernizr)
- Bluff – graphing (HTML5/canvas)
- Processing.js – replace Java, etc. w/o plugin
Keep it Accessible: make sure there’s fallback
- JavaScript is not just a barrier, way of punching through the barriers
- video: javascript that adds keyboard support to flash videos
What can we do?
- support for autofocus/required input attributes (html5)
- input types in html5 (unsupported fallback to text input)
- scan tables to pass to bluff for graphing
JavaScript
- means we don’t have to wait for browser makers or standards bodies
- speeds up the evolution of the web
- payoff for years of web standards evangelism
Q&A
- Doesn’t it cause a problem to use a toolkit to solve a problem that will later be solved:
- simple to just cut out a piece of JS when it’s no longer needed
- What happens when JS isn’t there?
- make sure it’s progressive enhancement
- still > relying on plugins