[ZWeb] NZO / Plone / etc

[Alexander Limi]

On Wed, 19 Feb 2003 22:44:27 -0500, george donnelly <list@zettai.net> 
wrote:

> 4. Javascript:
>
> I think the javascript stuff should be dumped. It slows things down and 
> its
> hard to make this work reliably across all platforms. Also, I suspect the
> main user of zope.org is the developer and and developers do not seem to 
> be
> javascript fans.

Can I dispel this myth once and for all?

1) Parsing a javascript file does not "slow things down" any more than 
parsing a CSS file. If you do stupid stuff, like looping - sure. But then 
it's the developer's fault, not Javascript.

2) The way we use javascript in Plone does not hide any options or stop you 
from doing anything when you don't have javascript turned on. This is an 
explicit stated goal of Plone.

3) The javascripts in Plone are convenience methods. It focuses on the 
first tabindex item on a page, fixes browser bugs transparently etc. They 
are all exceedingly simple.

4) "Hard to make it work reliably across all platforms" - no. If you stick 
to the DOM2 spec, things will work perfectly in IE, Mozilla and Opera. The 
other browsers (like Netscape 4) simply ignores it. There is not one 
browser out there that has problems with this.

5) If you are not a javascript fan, you turn it off. All browsers that I've 
seen have an option to do this.

What I'll give you, and what I agree with, is the tooltips approach of 
Plone forms. It grew out of a different need, and got wrongly applied to 
this. Usability-wise, it's the worst thing I did to Plone. I'm changing 
this in Plone 1.1.

-- 
Alexander Limi
http://limi.net