The future of JavaScript

For those who have not heard, ECMAScript 4 is no more. That also means that JavaScript 2 is currently at best paused. Some will mourn this as a great loss. I am not one of those.

JavaScript 2 had some very interesting ideas in it, but I am far from convinced that it was the future. I firmly believe that JavaScript 1.x has a long long way to run yet.

It is not often that I will link to an article on Slashdot, but this one piqued my interest.

The future of JavaScript is very much tied up in the present and future of browsers. Much of what I have to say here is also true about future versions of CSS.

The problems we as web professionals face today is not due to a shortcoming of JavaScript or CSS or HTML. They are due to shortcomings of the browsers. Until browsers support the standards, there may as well not be standards.

So we have options. We can introduce new ideas and new technologies which will only be supported by a sub-set of users for a fairly long period and will then fall into a category of technologies we are reticent to use due to the need to support older browsers.

Or, we can wait for the browsers to catch up with the standards so that we can exploit them to the full, with guaranteed compatibility.

Well, I dont fancy waiting something like 4 or 5 or even 6 years for browsers to catch up with the standards, I want to do cool, new and interesting things now. So, we are left with the former of the 2 options I present above.

Of course, the thing which allows us to push forward and use the new technologies of CSS and JavaScript which are being introduced and still provide a good level of cross browser support is JavaScript! Look at how the innovative use of JavaScript, largely by library authors, has driven the W3C and browser vendors to introduce new native features to the browsers. This is only of benefit to us.

I firmly believe that changing the core nature of JavaScript now would undermine a lot of the good work of the last few years and it would also be to deny the true power of JavaScript as it stands today. Yes, there is a barrier to people wanting to learn JavaScript - it can be complex, it is difficult to master - but this also is a good thing. Ultimately the standard of JavaScript development will improve and we don't need a new version of the language to make this happen.

JavaScript is an amazingly flexible language and finding new ways of bending it to our will is going to define the next set of standards, the next set of tools that we want to see, and it is the next set of standards that are far more likely to be adhered to than the current generation.

We must not stifle innovation, we must encourage it. Keeping a massive level of embedded knowledge whilst JavaScript is still at its infancy of true professionalism is the right way forward. Maintaining the core of the language as it stands moving forward must be a good thing. Yes, lets play with other languages in the browser, lets even use and support them, but where JavaScript is concerned, my message is clear - don't go changing!