No, this isn’t a post about being stalked in the Library of Congress, or the British Library. It’s about Web developers being encouraged to look backward rather than forward.
‘How-to’ books and online tutorials encourage it. Authoring tools like Dreamweaver and GoLive include it automatically. Even my beloved HomeSite+ assumes you will want it as an option.
What is it? It’s the habit, when putting some JavaScript into a Web page, of including HTML comment tags immediately after the opening script tag, and immediately before the closing tag. Like this:
You might wonder: which older browsers are we talking about?
JavaScript was first implemented, in an upgrade of the Netscape 2 browser, in 1995. Since that time every single Web browser has recognised JavaScript when it saw it: Internet Explorer from version 3 (1996), Netscape itself (obviously), and all the browsers developed after 1995—Opera, Mozilla, Safari, Firefox… So we don’t need to hide from them.
It seems we’re hiding from Mosaic, the first visual browser (1993), or from Tim Berners-Lee’s original text browser (1990).
As part of my tally of visitors to the home page of my personal website—which I referred to a couple of days ago—I’ve also noted the browsers they use. (Anyone can do this using the visitor analytics programs bundled with decent Web hosting packages: I just found it useful to have the data in one place.) The oldest browser anyone has ever used, in the last eighteen months, is Internet Explorer 5. (Just three visitors, who presumably don’t use the Web that often—and in any case the browser is JavaScript-aware.)
Why are we still hiding?
