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Today I met up with Peter-Paul Koch (PPK from here on), Bobby van der Sluis, Anne van Kesteren, Jeroen Mulder and many others. The place: Amsterdam. The subject: Javascript! What follows is an overview of the meetup.

Most of all present people didn't really know what to expect from the meetup: PPK had announced it as "just an informal chat about Javascript" more or less, but as it turned out he had prepared it quite thoroughly.

The first point of order was the question of how to bring more focus to modern Javascript. We all agreed that it was time for a change in the way Javascript is perceived (both globally as well as just within the Netherlands), as - and this was mentioned at @media, too - Javascript currently has a bad reputation. Additionally, there are a lot of people who want to learn more Javascript but don't know where nor how to start.

Of course, the first hurdle we need to overcome is to define what modern Javascript is in the first place. For that, we ended up with a pretty simple definition: modern Javascript is unobtrusive, meaning: it degrades gracefully or functions only as a progressive enhancement.

Now, most of all our readers are all pretty much aware of this already; several will probably even have thought "duh?" at the sight of that definition. But the fact of the matter is that most Javascript you'll find on the web today is anything but unobtrusive, and that's where one clean, simple definition can help.

So we have our definition; now we need to explain it in a more detailed, technical matter. This is where we establish "phase 1" of our plan of action: writing a plethora of small Javascript tutorials using modern Javascript rather than the horrible Javascript that you'll find in tutorials today. Preferrably, these would all be written in both Dutch and English, but we're going to discuss that some more in a future meetup.

Before writing any articles and tutorials, however, it's good to know the targeted audience, or in our case, audiences. PPK separated our entire audience into three types:

1. Designers who are already familiar with CSS and semantic XHTML, and so forth
2. old-school Javascript programmers who are, basically, using very obtrusive Javascript
3. Application developers, where "Application" includes both back-ends (web-based CMS's and the like) and authoring tools (Dreamweaver etc.)

Slowly our plans began to take shape. Discussion erupted about forming a Task Force similar to what the WaSP is doing in various areas. This Task Force would research many of the largely unknown issues, such as:

• Javascript and its effect on screenreaders and alternative browsers (mobile phone browsers and the like)
• DOM-scripting, remote scripting and the accessibility factors thereof
• How to promote modern Javascript in a business environment to give it a better name again, as well as to remove old-school Javascript and replace it with clean, unobtrustive Javascript

As much as our discussions were progressing steadily and with good spirits, plenty of very serious issues were raised. First of all, it'll be a very difficult task for most developers to convince companies to effectively have two versions of a site, as two versions generally means double the costs. As much as Bobby had a great point in that we should choose the definitions carefully ("progressive enhancement" is so much more appealing than "graceful degradation"), there are still many situations where we can only expect the worst:the client will just not care about having a properly functioning site for users that have Javascript disabled (or are using old browsers), and torpedo all our efforts.

This is where we'll have to be as strategic about things as the WaSP is, if we want to be anywhere near as successful.

Another issue is the organizational problem. Most web development companies have more than one person for the creation of websites. There is the front-end designer, which creates a visual layout and often converts it to HTML. He or she then provides the HTML to the back-end programmer who implements it into a system of sorts.

Javascript simply is a programming language, but it's also front-end. So who should be educated in it, the front-end designer or the back-end programmer? Both of them?

This organizational problem persists in nearly all corporations there are, so there is a definite need for function assessments and workflow schematics that take all tasks and aspects of full website development into account. The big challenge therein lies in getting it to make sense to a company with three employees just as well as a company with three hundred employees. This will be one of the main topics for the next meetup, as most of us will need to do some research for this, first.

An idea that came up was the formation of a site with visually appealing examples of modern Javascript. Basically the CSS Zen Garden meets Modern Javascript. Forming and implementing such a site, however, will be far more tricky than the CSS Zen Garden, but with some luck it may just happen yet. Keep your eyes open and let us know if you have any ideas for that.

The rest of the evening was dominated by people's experiences and stories, or in some cases (like mine) the discussion of project ideas and the formation of new projects.

In the end, the meetup proved to be a great success. More news will be announced by PPK as soon as it's available.

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