Why is there no OFFICIAL JavaScript reference? [closed]
I tried to search for a JavaScript reference, but there's none available. The best two suggested sources are MDN (Mozilla Developer Network) and ECMA (https://262.ecma-international.org/12.0/)
Why?
Solution 1:
It's not like there is an official JavaScript release. All the browsers have made their own JavaScript engine - some are using the same though. But especially Internet Explorer has its own version that doesn't support a lot of what the other browsers support, making it very difficult to make a general JavaScript reference.
Edit:
While I know there is an official ECMA standard and development team, my point is that it doesn't really matter as long as browsers (Internet Explorer) doesn't live up to it. At the end of the day, clients want JavaScript to work for Internet Explorer too. They won't care about the ECMA standards, they just want it to work. This is where JavaScript libraries come into the picture, but that's another story.
It's the same issues with HTML and CSS, we can't use these tools for active development until:
- All browsers support them.
- We supply the browsers with code to make them support it.
- It's okay it doesn't work in all browsers.
Edit2:
Internet Explorer is getting close to the grave with the new browser project from Microsoft: Edge. This, however, doesn't really change the overall picture. We still have a lot if different browsers we need to support. Developers are constantly trying to push the boundaries of what's possible. This means that we often have this issue, some browser version we want to support doesn't support some feature of the standard (which usually is a bit fluid), which means we need to make some workaround or use frameworks that implement the missing built in features.
Solution 2:
You can try with the official ECMAscript site,
http://www.ecmascript.org/
but the useful thing is actually the implementation of each browser.
I like this cheatsheet from Danny Goodman's JavaScript Bible a lot:
http://media.wiley.com/product_ancillary/12/04705269/DOWNLOAD/9780470526910_Appendix_A.pdf
Solution 3:
I would say this one is the "official": https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript
You also have the ECMAScript Language Specification, 5.1 Edition (or as a PDF, the definitive specification).
And from Microsoft: JavaScript Language Reference: "This documentation explains the Microsoft implementation of JavaScript, which is compliant with the ECMAScript 5th Edition language specification. It also provides additional features that are not included in the Ecma Standards."
Solution 4:
If you're using ECMAScript for the web (which 99.9% of people are), then beyond the basics syntactics of the language (covered in the ECMA-262 spec mentioned above), what you're probably looking for is a DOM reference - which is the ECMAScript API that's used to interact with web documents.
I'm very surprised noone has mentioned the DOM api sofar. Current W3C DOM standard is here: http://www.w3.org/TR/DOM-Level-2-Core/
(btw, as for the naming confusion - ECMAScript is the name of the official standard, and "Javascript" and "JScript" are Netscape and Microsoft's proprietary "forks")