Month

Brief Information about the January 98 CSIG Meeting

JavaScript by Ron Winter


Leader: Bruce Arnold (b a r n o l d @ b l a s t . n e t)

Summary by: Ron Murawski (the_murs@pipeline.com)

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User Group News

C/C++ User Group

January's C/C++ meeting was on the third Tuesday of the month. It started with a random access period. One member mentioned a new program by Dan Bricklin called Trellix. There was also mention of an announcement by Microsoft, Intel, GTE, and many other phone companies supporting a to-be-announced standard of implementing Digital Subscriber Line service that enables 1 megabit/second Internet download speeds. Another item discussed was the possibility of a web page version of the ACGNJ Newsletter replacing the paper version that all members now receive.

Ron Winter did the main presentation. The topic was JavaScript. Ron very quickly dispelled the notion that JavaScript is related to Java in any way. It is, instead, an interpreted scripting language with object-oriented features for use with Internet HTML web pages. It strongly resembles the C language in form and syntax.

Ron delineated the history of JavaScript from its birth at, of all places, the European Computer Manufacturers Association (ECMA) to its present-day status as ubiquitous web page language. He also pointed out why there is a difference between Microsoft's and Netscape's JavaScript implementations. He also presented some traps and pitfalls that beleaguer JavaScript programmers because of this fact.

One of the more amusing pitfalls is the issue of case-sensitivity: JavaScript is supposed to be case-sensitive, but Microsoft's implementation is only somewhat case-sensitive. Why? Ron explained that Microsoft implements Visual Basic script in its browser in addition to `JScript', and where the two languages overlap, the case insensitive aspects of VBscript win out. Somehow though, Netscape got it right. Unfortunately, this means that although all code must be carefully typed in proper case, you cannot take any advantage of this at all.

Ron showed how to embed JavaScript within HTML pages. He also showed an example of a simple JavaScript using the event handlers OnMouseOver and OnMouseOut. Ron also presented web links for interested participants to pursue.


"Random Access" questions start at 7:30 Tuesday night.

SOURCE CODE

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