Limitations: Deal with it - Javascript in the '90s

Limitations: Deal with it Javascript in the '90s

Me Javascript developer since 1997 Jubii, SpamFighter, PivX, Zyb

A walk down memory lane

1994 to 2000 The browser wars

2000 • IE at 85% market share • Netscape at
13% • HTML 4 • CSS improvements • XMLHttpRequest

My 2000 hardware Windows 2000, Pentium 200 Mhz

33% • A mixed bag of browser versions, old and new • Netscape 3 still in some use

My 1999 hardware • Windows 98 SE • Pentium 133
Mhz • 28.8K modem

My 1999 project

70%

What happened • Netscape 4 released the year before •
JavaScript Style Sheets

My 1998 hardware • Windows 98 • Pentium 90 Mhz
• 14.4K modem

1998 • Netscape 3 still heavily used • Almost no
CSS use • Javascript was mostly form validation • Layout: <table> and <font>

81% market share • Netscape 4 released in June (Javascript 1.2) • IE4 released in October (CSS, Jscript 3) • Netscape 3 was king

1996 • IE at 9% • Netscape at 54% •
IE3 released in August - Jscript! • Netscape 3 released in August - Javascript 1.1 • HTML 3.2!

My 1996 hardware • Windows 95 • 486 66Mhz •
2.4K modem

1995 Javascript 1.0

State of the art • Netscape 2 • HTML 2
• Frames • <table>, <font> and <blink> • GIF89a, progressive JPEG and Image maps • Livescript and Plugins

Limitations • No DOM • No CSS • Cross browser
inconsistencies

Limitations • No regular expressions • No array/object literals •
No XMLHttpRequest • No external script includes

Minor limitations • No Array.pop/push/shift/unshift • No String.split/substr • No
Number.toString • No setInterval • No console

Level 0 DOM • document.images • document.forms • document.links •
document.anchors

1995: Dynamic Web Apps • <frameset> and <frame> to maintain
state • Rewrite entire HTML document • Async communication using Image cookies

Application State • Top level window object – <title> and
<frameset> • Individual frames per namespace – <frame name=”App”> – <frame name=”Constants”> • Individual frames per view

Script caching • Inline script • Frames serve as REST
endpoints • Still just ordinary HTTP caching • Split scripts to avoid thread locking – Used by Gmail today

Dynamic updates • Wrap DOM-0 output • document.write(“<html><head>...</html>”)

Array manipulations • new Array() • function array_push(...) • function
array_pop(...) •

String manipulations • function string_split(...) • function string_replace(...) •

Async Requests • Feature detection on window.Image • Fallback to
frame request polling • Chunked encoding for >1KB

My 1994 modem

The End • Github: http://tiny.cc/cphjs • Twitter @thorlarholm

Limitations: Deal with it - Javascript in the '90s

Limitations: Deal with it - Javascript in the '90s

Thor Larholm

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