How to Destroy the Web

A little old, but still very very relevant, a few choice quotes, full slideshow at the bottom.

“If we can convince everyone that they need to be JavaScript experts to write web applications, then fewer people will write web apps, and the web will crumble into dust. Better still, those people will not use a library, and will spend all their time redoing all the cross-browser work that Sam Stephenson with Prototype and John Resig and the jQuery team and Alex Russell and the Dojo team have already done.”

“If we can convince people that they need to be JavaScript experts to use Ajax technologies, then people won’t use them as much and the web as a whole will be degraded! Yes! Remember, you want to use phrases like ‘the law of leaky abstractions’ and ‘efficiency’ and ‘understanding’ and ‘guns in the hands of children’ to make your point here. Let’s convince the mass of web developers that they’re not allowed to touch JavaScript unless they’re PPK or Douglas Crockford, and then we’ll stop the web getting any better.”

“If the web is easy then the terrorists win.”

This is all from Stuart Langridge’s presentation at @media Ajax on the 19th of November, 2007. Good stuff, check out the whole presentation below with the non-notated version first, and the tersely notated version second (starting on slide 42).

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