A tail of Javascript libraries, and my pondering about David Mark.

Hi,

I'm an frontend developer, and as such I end up doing some amount of Javascript. I have an interest in the language, so I follow a number of blogs, hang out in forums, etc..

I have noticed a person going by the name of David Mark, going around places throwing shit at everybody's favorite library. Over time, a question has been sort of haunting me about David Mark: if you take away the man, what about his technical comments, and his own library ?

I mean, I totally understand that he is a self-righteous prick, who has failed to establish any sort of dialog, and we seem to prefer adding insult to injury rather than reaching out and giving a hand. It's kinda hard to listen to the messenger when he is spitting on you and slapping you in the face. However, his most technical comments seem to make sense to me, in particular the idea of feature detection vs sniffing (ex: http://ajaxian.com/archives/dojo-1-5-is-out-and-its-feature-packed).

So I'm curious. Has anyone used his library, or looked at any of his code ? What about his technical comments and point of views ? Do they make sense ? Is this a time where you have to forget about the messenger and try to listen to the message ?

PS: I'm in no way affiliated with David Mark. Also this is not entirely a technical question per se, but I wasn't sure where else to ask it.

getEBCN() seems to be getElementsByClassName() (not an alias, but the function name itself)getEBCS() means getElementByCssSelector(), I think, and looks a lot like the jQuery selector.getEBXP() means getElementByXPath()...The problem with those is that the naming is not consistent with the other methods of My Library (I mean, his library).

Sebastián Grignoli 2010-08-12 07:24:34

The rest of his methods are consistently named, and look like the DOM API. It's more a con than a pro.

Sebastián Grignoli 2010-08-12 07:26:18

And please remind: [David Mark votes against StackOverflow](http://davidmarkfans.wordpress.com/2010/08/11/david-mark-votes-against-stackoverflow/) ;-)

Anne 2010-08-12 07:40:11

I've just been reading that blog. Man! This guy is the "Ignatius Reilly" of the Javascript world!http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Confederacy_of_Dunces

Sebastián Grignoli 2010-08-12 07:41:53

@Anne: well, SO deserves a bit of that then... The [question](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/833699/clientheight-clientwidth-returning-different-values-on-different-browsers) referenced in that rant does indeed have a lousy accepted answer. But it's hard to sympathize with someone who'd rather rant about it elsewhere than post a decent answer himself.

Shog9 2010-08-12 16:20:21

Since this question is now closed, I will have to make do with a comment. David Mark undoubtedly does himself no favours with his communication style, but his JavaScript knowledge is very extensive, his code is usually sound, thorough and robust, and most of his criticisms of libraries are well-founded. In short, if you're a JavaScript developer with an open mind, you'd do well to look past anything you may find unpalatable about his style and assess his technical points carefully.

Tim Down 2010-08-12 19:50:12

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A tail of Javascript libraries, and my pondering about David Mark.

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