
The dynamic, powerful abilities of JavaScript Style Sheets (1997) - Lammy
http://sunsite.uakom.sk/sunworldonline/swol-04-1997/swol-04-webmaster.html
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temporallobe
This is a fascinating look back at the beginnings of CSS and JavaScript. Back
then it was the wild west and anything seemed possible. I kinda miss those
days at times. This was about the time I was in university, just learning the
very basic concepts of CSS and JavaScript. Now we have “stacks” that provide
so many layers of abstraction that hardly anyone in my field actually knows
the underlying core trinity (JavaScript, CSS, and HTML). In fact, many
seasoned web app developers I know have no clue how to construct basic tables.
I’ve spoken to countless developers (one in fact who has a PhD in GIS) who was
not aware that the ONLY thing browsers understand are those three things -
there is no other magic under the hood. And don’t get me started on transpiled
languages like Coffeescript and TypeScript. I actually had an argument with a
developer who thought that browsers natively understood these languages. I had
to prove this by showing him in the debugger that the browser only loaded .js
files. I’m not saying these tools don’t have merits, but the farther away we
get from what browsers actually use, the harder it will be to understand,
debug, and fix the products we create.

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dragonwriter
> I’ve spoken to countless developers (one in fact who has a PhD in GIS) who
> was not aware that the ONLY thing browsers understand are those three things

Er, most browsers have built in handling for things other than HTML, JS, and
CSS. XML (generically), XSLT, SVG, GIF, PNG, JPEG, WOFF, PDF,...

