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Comment by gotchange | Hacker News Reader

The weak DOM API not JS was what plagued the early web period from 2000 - 2005.

Maybe I'm just old, but from the perspective of the current day, I'd call the early web period 1990-1995. Or possibly 1990-2000.

2000-2005 is the early "dynamic html" period. Or at least that's what I put on my resume at the time.

Actually DHTML goes back to 1997 (with Netscape Navigator 4 and Internet Explorer 4).

I just had a pang of nostalgia after I checked and saw that Dynamic Drive is still online :)

Dynamic Drive was how I learned Javascript back in the day! Pulling apart how the author of a script had written it, to see how to get the snowflakes drifting down my page become leaves instead ;)

Not maybe, but yes.

1990-95 is pre-Netscape -- that's kind of pre-history.

(I too am old enough to remember the internet before the web. You really had to work hard to goof off at work when all you had was nntp, archie and gopher.)

What, you didn't use mosaic? I used mosaic, on VMS no less.

I did too, on SunOS. I remember the early days when renavigating to a page would just pull up the cache version and not refresh automatically -- I didn't understand why wsj.com wasn't publishing new content daily.

And I still miss the spinning globe.

I used Internet Explorer on SunOS for testing Applets on Windows and Unix.

> You really had to work hard to goof off at work when all you had was nntp, archie and gopher.

Nonsense, I could goof off quite easily with nntp :)

Not weak, but every browser had their own non spec API functions to traverse the DOM in various ways. JQuery offered an easier cross browser API, whereas otherwise one would have to handle various bugs and different API functions.

Particularly events. I think there are technically 3 different ways to create event handlers, one for each of the major js engines of the early 2000's.

Listeners are complicated, but .onclick and friends work everywhere and always have.

For the simplest cases, yes, but even there you could easily find oddities with things like cancellation, bubbling, timing with regards to other events, support for various element types, etc.

Here's a whole list just for click, which is probably the most standardized event handler, and doesn't even go back before the IE5.5 era:

http://quirksmode.org/dom/events/click.html

to double down, touch events on mobile browsers are in a different order than mouse event in regards of onclicks, so that a touchend and mouseup fire at the opposite side of the click event on some mobile browser but not all.

Until you want to add more than one onclick event.

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