Hello,
I was wondering if anyone knew of any comprehensive lists of javascript tools.
Examples of what I am looking for are:
List of all Events/event Listeners
List of all keywords.
I am reading Simply Javascript by Kevin Yank and Cameron Adams and just finished covering Events, but it is difficult to create unique sites when the only events you know are click, blur, and focus.
Thanks for your help!
I highly recommend https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/learn/javascript
That can be found in the JavaScript Reference, which has a list of all the global objects plus the list of reserved words.
The W3Schools has a list that seems to be largely complete and easy to read. Or if you’re ready for some super-dense reading, the [url=http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/REC-DOM-Level-2-Events-20001113/events.html]DOM Events spec is the most comprehensive.
Thanks for your suggestions Jeff!
Is W3Schools, fully up-to-date according to W3C’s latest specifications? One of my good friends warned me that they had fallen behind on maintenance, any clue?
Looks that way to me… at least for the DOM events. That’s the only part I checked just now.
The best place that I’ve found for detailed information on events is at the Quirksmode site where the author takes you through many of the browser compatability issues, and what can be done to resolve such issues. Here’s the Introduction to Events
While we do have our own reference, linked already above, the place that I keep turning to time and time again because of the info that it has is the Mozilla Developer Network with its JavaScript Reference and in particular to your query, [url=“https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript/Reference/Reserved_Words”]Reserved Keywords
They have fallen way behind. There is a www.w3fools.com site that attempts to catalog all of the problems, as a warning to others and so that hopefully the w3schools site can be improved on.
You posted some great suggestions and great links, but just this one I disagree with. I think the site w3fools is actually unfair and overly nitpicky. For example, their first issue in the list is that Schools had said, “Browsers automatically add an empty line before and after a heading.” Fools thinks it should have said, “Browsers’ default stylesheets define these elements as block-level with non-zero margin-top and margin-bottom values.” Considering that this is a tutorial for newbies who probably won’t know anything about CSS, I think the Schools explanation was just fine, and even preferred over the Fools alternative. A few rules down is an issue with frames. Fools seems to be criticizing that Schools even mentioned frames at all, as if to acknowledge that they exist is a crime. I think that’s extremely unfair criticism. I won’t pretend that W3Schools is perfect. They’ve definitely made mistakes over the years, some of them egregious, but those kinds of mistakes are a minority in the Fools list, and many of them have been fixed, either recently or long ago. I think it’s time that we re-evaluate W3Schools and whether it’s so disastrously bad that it deserves the label “harmful to the Web.”
You will notice that that particular example you picked has a strikeout effect on the url indicating that w3schools has corrected the issue.
Before they said: “Note: Browsers automatically add an empty line before and after a heading.”
Now they say: “Browsers automatically add some empty space (a margin) before and after each heading.”
But no improvements have occurred to any of their JavaScript faults yet.
So improvements are occurring with w3schools - it’s just a shame that it takes a public shaming effort to drive such improvements.
I noticed. But what I mean is, even before the update, I think that particular piece of criticism was overblown. Considering that this is a tutorial for the absolute newbie, I think what Schools had written was better than the Fools version.
But no improvements have occurred to any of their JavaScript faults yet.
Even a good number of the JavaScript criticisms, I think, are overly nitpicky or just plain unfair. Such as, for example, criticizing the use of document.write, yet tutorials that Fools recommends, such as the W3C wiki, do exactly the same thing. I suspect both sites used it in this kind of situation because the only other option to put something on the page would be DOM manipulation, which would probably introduce more concepts than is desirable at such an early stage of a tutorial. Of all the Fools JavaScript criticisms, the only one that seems legitimate and that I think deserves the label “harmful to the web” is passing a string to setTimeout. The rest seem either minor, misconstrued, or fixed. (Yes, several of the JS issues have been fixed. Fools apparently hasn’t updated their site. Perhaps they should take their own advice and wikify their content.)
Meh, I have w3schools bookmarked, while I don’t have the MDN bookmarked even though I’m there a few times a day. I love Paul Irish and crew, but they can be extremists sometimes.
w3schools has a really bad rap, but actually it’s not a bad resource at all. I’ve yet to find a place where I can land on the page, glance at it, and understand/remember what I need to do in a few seconds. For me, it has the best structure of them all…even if the material is subpar.
W3C - Encyclopedic information on the technical specifics
MDN - Awesome organization, community driven, and examples/demos that will have your jaw dropping
W3Schools - Easy to digest layout, accompanied by their “Try It!” editor
Their beginner examples are full of obsolete commands such as document.write() and slert() which were replaced for the uses made of them in those examples long ago. The alert dialog should only be used now for debugging where you are to lazy to use the debugger built into the browser - some browsers display an option to turn off JavaScript for the web page and other display an option to disable all dialogs when they display an alert (or any other dialog) in order to make their use for debugging easier and making them inappropriate for any other putpose. Anything that document.write() can do in JavaScript attached to a web page should really be done server side before displaying the page or if it has to be done using JavaScript is better done using innerHTML instead.
The www.w3fools.com site lists some of the parts of w3schools that are out of date - the list of outdated JavaScript listed there is about 5% of the complete list of outdated JavaScript shown on the w3schools site. The w3schools site covers too many different topics for the two guys who created it to keep it up to date.
Highly respected beginner tutorials such as CodeAcademy, or the W3Fools-recommended W3C wiki, do exactly the same thing.
I’m by no means claiming that W3Schools is the greatest or even a good resource, but criticizing it has become such a pastime that now we’ve become unfair and even hypocritical with our criticisms.