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When a CGI Script is the Most Elegant Solution
An anonymous reader writes "Writing local Web applications can be quick, easy, and efficient for solving specific Intranet problems. Learn why a Web browser is sometimes a better interface than a GUI application and why experienced Web developers find themselves struggling to learn a GUI toolkit, and descover that a simple CGI script would serve their needs perfectly well, if not better."
"But which bits of java script are fancy and which are not?"
This is actually quite easy. Stuff that relates to the DOM often differ from browser to browser while the core language does not. This is somewhat similar to the fact that you can compile and link ANSI-compliant C on virtually any platform as long as you don't do anything platform specific.
At work I recently developed a JavaScript framework for calculating text length that had to take variable character widths and hyphenation into account. The idea is that the user can type away in a standard TEXTAREA field and know when some predefined text area in a PDF document is full. I think the code ended up as 500+ lines of JavaScript code, but the ONLY browser specific problem I ran into was a subtle difference in the parsing of arrays; Firefox would treat the statement [1,2,3,4,] as an array with the length of 4, while Internet Explorer would say the length was instead 5 (and the last value was "undefined", if I recall). I gather that the reason why browser independence came so painlessly was that 95% of the code was just text processing and number crunching anyway. I doubt I'd have the same luck if I tried to do a WYSIWYG editor since it would have a great more interaction with the DOM.