Path: csiph.com!usenet.pasdenom.info!weretis.net!feeder4.news.weretis.net!news.teledata-fn.de!newsfeed.arcor.de!newsspool1.arcor-online.net!news.arcor.de.POSTED!not-for-mail Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" Message-ID: <1682512.96Mmdoi5ah@PointedEars.de> From: Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn Reply-To: Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn Organization: PointedEars Software (PES) Date: Mon, 06 May 2013 18:10:32 +0200 User-Agent: KNode/4.8.5 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8Bit X-Face: %i>XG-yXR'\"2P/C_aO%~;2o~?g0pPKmbOw^=NT`tprDEf++D.m7"}HW6.#=U:?2GGctkL,f89@H46O$ASoW&?s}.k+&. MIME-Version: 1.0 Lines: 56 NNTP-Posting-Date: 06 May 2013 18:12:07 CEST NNTP-Posting-Host: e2f83818.newsspool4.arcor-online.net X-Trace: DXC=dAH8E9M_Ibcg`45cDR8l?o4IUK Andrew wrote: >> Is there an online reference of reasonable quality, similar to the >> documentation for Python? (I'm guessing no, but would like to be wrong) > > I don't really know the Python documentation, but there is definitely > not one definitive source of API documentation, The reason of which is that, AFAIK by contrast to Python, there is no “Javascript”. I am still amazed how some people can still manage to ignore that basic fact. > but note that the API is quite small. IBTD. For the next version of the ECMAScript Support Matrix (see [1] for the current version), to date I compared 278 native language features, and the list is still incomplete. Of those features, (unless I miscounted slightly) only 81 were syntactical and could not reasonably be said to be part of an API. I expect the percentage of the “API features” of the various ECMAScript implementations to be growing as I test more features and implementations, and as “Harmony” (ES 6-to-be) proposals are implemented. It can only be reasonably stated that the built-in API of ECMAScript is smaller than the built-in API of Python. This is supported by the fact that Python has a built-in tree-like module system, while most ECMAScript implementations (and particularly those used in Web browsers) do not. Any modules are either implementation-specific or provided for (dynamic) inclusion in markup documents by third parties (libraries); namespacing is only artificial (and unfortunately is going to remain so – according to Brendan Eich, the namespace proposal has been dropped to achieve “ECMAScript Harmony”, and is not coming back). > The best reference site might well be MDN [1] but it is not a tutorial. MDN does contain a (Mozilla) _JavaScript_ tutorial, because there are more ECMAScript implementations (than JavaScript), and more DOM implementations than the Gecko DOM. For example, the documentation and tutorial for JScript and the MSHTML DOM, the programming language and DOM API in Internet Explorer-based applications, respectively, can be found in the MSDN Library instead. Links to reference material other than books can be found in the FAQs for this newsgroup. [2] In fact, books are the resources that are the least recommended there for good reasons. _______ [1] [2] contains a maintained, currently only slightly modified version of