Open Letter to the DOM Scripting Task Force
Dear DSTF,
I applaud your effort to bring JavaScript into a better light, and teach people how to write scripts following best practices. However, I am worried that your focus on unobtrusiveness and best practices will result in less attention for code quality.
A recent example of this is your post about Image Previews. While the script you link to is certainly unobtrusive, I don’t think it’s a good example of code quality, or for that matter, DOM scripting.
I won’t complain about the coding style of the JavaScript, that’s entirely personal. (Although some more whitespace can’t hurt.) No, one of the problems is that the script, written by one of your members, even, does not use DOM events. For a script linked to from your weblog I find that disturbing. Another, and perhaps worse, issue is that the script leaks memory.
Things like memory leakage can be hard to grasp, but it’s fundamental that DOM scripters understand these problems and work around them. Promoting a script which does not use DOM events is giving the wrong example. By all means, link to a great unobtrusive script, but in that same post also point out what could be improved. Please check the code quality of the scripts you link to: people will try to learn from the code and it’s important they learn it correctly.
If all goes well, you’ll be a huge influence to many new developers. Let’s get the max out of that influence.
Kind regards,
- Mark Wubben
P.S. I realized during writing this letter that the script in question was written by and about by Christian Heilmann, one of your members. Please understand that this post is not meant as an attack on Christian, but as an expression of my worries. Again, I applaud you for your efforts.
