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> but I wouldn't recommend it. Why? Because
> its flavors change depending upon the browser. I recently backed out all
> of the javascript in my HTML systems, because I couldn't get them to
> reliably work.
Great.
I work in computer security and always keep Javascript disabled in my
browser, for security reasons. Most people I know disable Java entirely.
I'm not quite as paranoid, so I'll enable that most of the time. I do
disable it before going to sites I consider risky).
I consider any site that does not work with Javascript disabled to be
broken.
> Moreover, once you learn another language, you'll be able
> to pick-up what you need to know about Javascript by looking at other
> people's HTML pages.
>
> Instead, my recommendation is Perl.
>
> Why? Because you can do things with Perl. You aren't limited to having
> it only work inside of a flaky browser; you aren't limited to the
> security restrictions of the browser. You aren't limited to HTML
> (javascript). You aren't limited to Microsoft applications
> (VisualBasic).
Excellent reasons!
> For example, I use Perl to post-process HTML that is generated by other
> off-the-shelf tools. I search-and-destroy hard-coded HTML font
> definitions so that the CSS can control the look-and-feel. I do other
> things to the HTML to make a unified system, like navigation across the
> top, copyright on the bottom, etc. I don't want to do this stuff by
> hand, particularly when the HTML is generated regularly and when there
> are several hundred files to edit. I let my Perl tools do it. (Makes me
> a hero when I can change major features of a whole HTML system just by
> running my tools.)
>
> Perl can be used to process all sorts of files, such as RTF or MIF (text
> based). Perl is an interpretted language, meaning I don't have to
> save/compile/link/run; I just save/run. Perl can be plugged into your
> Web-server so that you run Perl scripts instead of CGI scripts.
However, if I were learning to do such things today, I'd do them in
Perl or perhaps Python.
I'd strongly recommend at least one such language, designed mainly for
text manipulation via scripts, as an important tool for almost any
writer. Whether or not you want to learn to program, there are some
things that are just much more easily done that way.
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