Client Side Woes

When it comes to web development, there's the server side and there's the client side. Server side development is like any other kind of software development, with all that it entails in terms of consistency, robustness, and sound structures. Client side development, however, is a different beast altogether.

On the client side you have a bunch of different technologies seemingly haphazardly bolted on top of each other. To make things worse, the browser vendors can't even agree on a standard. Every browser has its own quirks and its own set of features. Microsoft's Internet Explorer, version 6 in particular, is infamous for its inability to comply with standards set forth by the W3C.

Traditionally, web developers have relied on a plethora of browser specific hacks and kludges to get by. Every site also used to have more than its fair share of reinvented wheels. The complexity of a more advanced website was truly overwhelming.

Fortunately, as the web has matured, the insanity has given birth to a number of client side frameworks, such as jQuery, mootools, and Prototype. These frameworks sweep the inconsistencies, hacks, and kludges under the carpet. They're still there, mind you, but as a developer you don't have to deal with them directly anymore. Instead, you use the clean and browser independent APIs of the frameworks. This site uses jQuery extensively and I look forward to further experimentation.

Software development is really about managing complexity and while encapsulating a bunch of hacks is not always a good thing, the frameworks reduce the complexity a web developer has to deal with considerably.

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