The javascript creator lays down the law with his thoughts on DHTML and AJAX. Read all of the juicy details yourself below…

With DHTML and AJAX hot (or hot again; we’ve been here before, and I don’t like either acronym), I am asked frequently these days about JavaScript, past and future. In spite of the fact that JS was misnamed (I will call it JS in the rest of this entry), standardized prematurely, then ignored and stagnated during most of its life, its primitives are strong enough that whole ecologies of toolkit and web-app code have emerged on top of it. (I don’t agree with everything Doug Crockford writes at the last two links, but most of his arrows hit their targets.)

Too many of the JS/DHTML toolkits have the “you must use our APIs for everything, including how you manipulate strings” disease. Some are cool, for example TIBET, which looks a lot like Smalltalk. Some have real value, e.g. Oddpost, which Yahoo! acquired perhaps as much for its DHTML toolkit as for the mail client built on that toolkit.

Yet no JS toolkit has taken off in a big way on the web, probably more on account of the costs of learning and bundling any given API, than because of the “you must use our APIs and only our APIs” problem. So people keep inventing their own toolkits. [Read the rest]