Hi James, OK I'm not sure how much you know of internet markup, so forgive me if I'm being too simplistic.
Way back in about 1995 what we know of as the internet was still pretty much in its infancy. At that stage, documents were rudimentary and the things that could be displayed on the web were fairly primitive. At this time browsers such as the text-based Lynx, and the graphically oriented Mosaic and Netscape were dominant. Documents were static. They were prepared using HTML, and the level of interactivity was minimal. Along came Netscape (the company) and decided it would be nice to have a degree of interactivity on the web. So they developed Javascript. In essence, javascript sits in the header portion of an HTML document and enables client-side scripts to be embedded into web pages. This differs from PHP (another scripting language) in that PHP runs on the server and delivers pages to the browser. OK let's give you an example. Let's suppose you have a form on a web page that requires a certain type of input; let's say for arguments sake a telephone number. So I as a user enter abcdef7 instead of 1 2 3 4 5 6 7. I click the submit button. If the developer has written the appropriate javascript code, it will check the input of the form before it is sent to the server for processing. If everything is in order, (which in our previous example it is not) it will send the data to the server for storage or whatever needs to be done. However, as there are errors in the data in the telephone number field it can either pop up a message box informing us of the error, or perform some other action. Javascript can also handle various events like mouse clicks, keyboard events, and loads of other things to make the web experience more dynamic. However, in my opinion, badly written Javascript has been responsible for more inaccessible or unusable webpages than anything else over the years, and yep I'm including flash in there as well. In essence, Javascript, therefore, is a client-side (or browser side) way of adding dynamism or interactivity to web pages. I'm giving a lecture to some first year undergrads on this stuff in a few weeks, so if you do want more info just let me know and I'll send you a link to the notes. Cheers, Donal On 12 Nov 2009, at 22:08, James & Nash wrote: > What is JavaScript? I've looked it up on Wikipedia, but I've found it too > technical. Thanks for any explainations. > > TC > James > ----- Original Message ----- > From: Chris Blouch > To: macvisionaries@googlegroups.com > Sent: Thursday, November 12, 2009 8:55 PM > Subject: Re: Safari 4.0.4 update released??? > > Nice. Sunspider Javascript benchmarks dropped from 857ms to 671ms on my > MacbookPro. That's a bit more than a 20% improvement in JavaScript execution > speed. > > CB > > Charlie Doremus wrote: >> Have just installed 4.0.4 update, minutes ago. If I see anything interesting >> will report. >> Macworld says; Software Update will tell you that the update improves >> JavaScript performance, makes searching through large browser histories less >> painful, and enhances the stability of third-party plug-ins and, for what >> it’s worth, Yahoo Mail (Yahoo!). >> >> On Thu, Nov 12, 2009 at 9:45 AM, Christina <blindmaclo...@gmail.com> wrote: >>> >>> I saw this on twitter and wondered if it was true and if anyone has >>> upgraded and noticed any changes or improvements. >>> >>> Thanks, >>> Christina >> >> >> >> >> >> >> -- >> Check out our web site, www.giantdolphin.com >> >> > > > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To post to this group, send email to macvisionaries@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
