WSG London Meetup
The first meet up of the WSG (Web Standards Group) in London was a big sucess. Though there were a few small organisaitonal issues. Well, one; The address given was not really that helpful in finding the lecture theatre. But most of the attendees overcame this and got to the room on time. It was really busy which was cool, and the guy who sat next to me was busy with his camera photographing everything (including my notes, I must see if I can find out where he uploaded them).
The first talk was “Andy Budd: Who cares about standards?”. Andy gave an inspring talk about standards, and why they aren’t important. What he really meant was that stanards are important, but they are not the important thing. Writing good websites is. Standards allow us to concentrate on the important things. Usability, Accessability, Branding(?!). A great, if somewhat controversial talk that didn’t go down with the audience quite as well as I would have thought. They seemed a bit hostile to his statement “the standards war is won” – meaning that while we are not yet 100% complient, we are going that way. I think he was spot on.
Next up we had “Christian Heilmann – Maintainable JavaScript”. Being a bit nitpicky here, but note that the first talk was presented with a : between the author and title, and the second with a -, lets sort this out guys – maybe we should have a standard :-).
Chris was another awesome speaker, getting everyone laughing a few times, but I was far from blown away by what he had to say. Maintainable Javascript: Great!-How? Here’s how:
- Namespacing: Great!
- Keeping local variables local: Great!
- Keep methods small and to the point: Great!
- Meainful method and variable names: Great!
- Documenting comments: Great!
But none of that was news to me. In fact, these were some of the concepts that drove the invention of object programming in the late 60s (though it took a while for them to mature to the OO languages of today, where these concepts are almost standardised – well, kinda). One of the questions made me think, and I would have prefered a fuller answer. The question was should javascript become an OO langauge. Chiris said no, that’s too complex for what its used for. I am inclinded to agree with him – at least for the time being. But how far in the direction of OO should javascript go. If it added language features to help the maintable practices Chris was preaching, it will definatly be a step in that direction. Where should the line be drawn?
Technorati Tags: wsg, web standards group, javascript, london
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Comments to “WSG London Meetup”
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Laurie says:
Hi Chris, good to know that my site is turning up in the search engines :-)
Your comment about not dwelling on the OO aspects because of the mix of the audience made me realise that its probably true that while many of the things you were saying are not new, they are not necessarily accepted by everyone who uses JS. This is for a couple of reasons I guess. Some JS developers are not computer scientists in the traditional sense, so they might be new ideas for them. And JS has often been seen as a bit of a languages to do hacks in, so many people who know better don’t bother to spend the time for good coding.
PS i have now also linked the main post to your slides
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Then you would have very strange conversations about the difference between java, which supports dynamic typing and closures, and java, which does not.
HI Laurie,
good that you enjoyed the meeting. As to your comment: Yes, none of this is nothing new and they are best practices of old programming languages. It was not my idea to invent something new, the idea is to remind ourselves of these steps instead of following down the same whizz-bang path we’ve trod in the DHTML boom days.
Right now we have JavaScript/Ajax rather nailed, and it is time to get some code quality and interoperability ideas in instead of just achieving the same task with 12 different libraries.
As to the OO question: I didn’t want to dwell on it too long as it is a complex dilemma (and I said so) and the mix of the audience would have meant half of the hall would have tried hard not to fall asleep as it would go well over their heads. It is a discussion for a more JS centric meeting or mailing list.
The DOM scripting Task Force of the WaSP is starting a mailing list soon that is dedicated to “modern” JS and this will be a good place to get real results rather than just the view of one guy on a stage.