"Also, since JavaScript has no formal classes there is no self-evident approach for structuring an entire application."
Crockford's prototypal revelation is only a slight alteration of the standard constructor pattern, and not a particularly useful one. You still have a class (the object that serves as a prototype for every instance you create), it doesn't add any particular flexibility, and it's quite slow. I encourage you to run the tests yourself:
http://jsperf.com/object-create-vs-crockford-vs-jorge-vs-con...
For me, that test clocks using Crockford's pattern to instantiate objects as 80% slower in Safari and Firefox, and 95% slower in Chrome, when compared to a standard use of JS prototypes.
- Crockford originally thought it worthwhile to emulate classical inheritance
- so many, many other frameworks (and technique essays) provide various flavors of class-based inheritance
and that:
- even embracing true prototypical inheritance requires additional helper functions (or at least did in EcmaScript 3)
...I'm a little confused that you disagree that "there is no self-evident approach" for dealing with JavaScript's 'conflicted' (as the linked article correctly states) way of being a so-called prototypical language.