http://www.mkbergman.com/339/doug-crockfords-javascript-lectures/ Mike Bergman on the semantic Web and structured Web Mon, 06 Feb 2012 00:15:33 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 http://www.mkbergman.com/339/doug-crockfords-javascript-lectures/comment-page-1/#comment-40270 AI3:::Adaptive Information » Blog Archive » Overcoming Limitations to JavaScript Collaboration Tue, 27 Feb 2007 03:17:47 +0000 http://www.mkbergman.com/?p=339#comment-40270 [...] Open source projects are often notorious for poor, even non-existent, documentation. (I very much like Mike Pope’s statement, “If it isn’t documented, it doesn’t exist.”) But the documentation curse is magnified for JavaScript . As Doug Crockford notes, the general state of standard language documentaton and guide books is poor. Developers also often learn from others’ code examples, and there is much in the way of JavaScript snippets, especially historical, that is atrocious. Even widely adopted frameworks, such as Prototype, have for years been nearly undocumented, a shortcoming now being addressed. Rarely (in fact I know of none for major open source packages) does there exist UML class or package diagrams for larger JS apps or frameworks. And, because much JavaScript is communicated to the browser as server-side scripts, embedded code comments are of generally poor quality or totally non-existent. All of these factors translate into the general absence of APIs for larger apps (though most of the leading frameworks and libraries such as Prototype, YUI and Dojo are now beginning to provide professional documentation). [...] [...] Open source projects are often notorious for poor, even non-existent, documentation. (I very much like Mike Pope’s statement, “If it isn’t documented, it doesn’t exist.”) But the documentation curse is magnified for JavaScript . As Doug Crockford notes, the general state of standard language documentaton and guide books is poor. Developers also often learn from others’ code examples, and there is much in the way of JavaScript snippets, especially historical, that is atrocious. Even widely adopted frameworks, such as Prototype, have for years been nearly undocumented, a shortcoming now being addressed. Rarely (in fact I know of none for major open source packages) does there exist UML class or package diagrams for larger JS apps or frameworks. And, because much JavaScript is communicated to the browser as server-side scripts, embedded code comments are of generally poor quality or totally non-existent. All of these factors translate into the general absence of APIs for larger apps (though most of the leading frameworks and libraries such as Prototype, YUI and Dojo are now beginning to provide professional documentation). [...]

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