A Farewell: The DHTML Journey

Sixteen weeks ago my classmates and I ventured forth from the relative safety of our computer desks, and began a voyage of joy and frustration that we called DHTML.  The first half of the journey was pretty smooth. The weather was fair and the road was mostly free of potholes. 

On the second half of the journey, however, a giant black hole called JavaScript opened up and swallowed the entire class. That was kind of a bummer. But our passage through the black hole wasn’t completely in vain. It was, above all else, a bonding experience. I’ll never forget my comrades in arms and their valiant struggles against the beast. Their bravery and sleepless nights will go down in the annals of history as one of the finest accomplishments of this generation.

How does this great adventure end, you may ask? Well, I don’t really have the answer to that question yet (you can ask again on Monday after 4 o’clock). As for this traveler, however, I suspect that the journey stops there.

Events

“Did you encounter problems?” Oh, come on. Of course I encountered problems. The key for me seems to be persistence. I just keep trying everything I can possibly think of, until something works. Sometimes it doesn’t make any logical sense why it works, but it works, and that’s better than nothing. I also look at everybody else’s to see how they got theirs to work, but that’s only good if someone has actually gotten it to function correctly. And like Jason, I use Firebug and if all else fails, I Google it. (I haven’t actually had much luck with that though.)

 For me, events have started to make JavaScript more practical. A lot of the stuff we did before didn’t really seem to have much purpose. It was neat, but not really very useful.  But with these last couple of assignments, we’ve been able not only to allow the user to input information that we take and process but also let the user control how they interact with our site. Now we’re really starting to see what JavaScript can do for us.