Dhtml Or Hiermenus Consulting?

[hnorris]

Hello -

Is there much of a market for larger scale JavaScript development work?
What about DHTML and hierarchical menus? Or Javascript and XSLT?

Or is JavaScript normally used primarily in conjunction with
other technologies, such as ActiveX, etc?

I pose these questions here because serious JavaScript/DHTML
development seems like such a narrow and specialized field, and
I've seen very few listings for it on standard tech jobs boards.
(hope its okay to ask a non-tech question on this board!)

Where is the best place to look for high level
DHTML or JavaScript related development work
(especially involving hierarchical menus)?
Thanks very much for your thoughts or suggestions!

- Hnorris

[hnorris]

Dave - thanks for your thoughts! Seems to confirm my impressions that most client side development is presently just a small scale adjunct to traditional server side web production. But I believe this will change as people better understand the potential for interactive client side DHTML driven by JavaScript and XSLT, etc.

If you're not familiar with it, check out XSLT - it's a rules based, declarative language, as opposed to a traditional procedural language. Meaning you don't define the the exact steps the program executes, rather you define rules or actions based on pattern matching - you describe behavior instead of programming each step, and thus let the XLST interpreter do the work for you. The Apache Ant build environment technololgy works in a similar way.

The upshot is that XSLT allows you to very easily re-skin or change the view of your XML/XHTML data, thus the client can effectively take over some of the functionality of the server. A great intro book is OReilly's "XLST" by Doug Tidwell. Microsoft apparently is providing client side XLST support in IE.

[hnorris]

Hi Celebguy -

I didn't understand the significance of the gif you posted in your reply - were you trying to point out the banner company in the link?

- Hnorris

[Stefan]

Originally posted by hnorris
I believe this will change as people better understand the potential for interactive client side DHTML driven by JavaScript and XSLT, etc.


I think it will not change until you get at least a 95%+ support in browsers used.

And considering even JavaScript is not available in 10-15% of users browsers (most of which depends on users manually turning it off becuse they are sick and tired of popup adds) I wouldn't ecpect this to happen too soon. Minimum 5 years, if ever (as long as people turn things off to be spared of the popup harassment).

[hnorris]

Hi Stefan -

Thanks for your thoughts - definitely some excellent points!

Problem with turning off browser features is that many web sites won't work at all, or they become very difficult to use.
without cookies, javascript, etc enabled,

Speaking of which, I've noticed that many ecommerce web sites these days will only run properly on IE.

- H