Unobtrusive Javascript and BeTwittered

I'm far from an expert on the topic of "unobtrusive Javascript," but I've seen some real benefits over the past couple of days. I've spent several hours re-writing BeTwittered, with some design ideas already in my head. One is the need to separate the front end (the web page) from the back end (the server and the data) Another idea was to move heavily to Javascript on the client-side, and to make it unobtrusive. The basic idea is to remove javascript code from the HTML. What you end up with is an HTML page that is easier to understand at a glance, and also lot's of Javascript code that binds to DOM events. The Javascript, in my case, is now much more organized. So far, it's made progress amazingly easy, and made my little hobby a lot more fun. This translates to better productivity.

My opinon? If you are fairly comfortable with HTML and Javascript, it may be time to start looking at separating the two. A Google search on the topic of "unobtrusive javascript" should get you lots of resources to get started. If you are just starting out with HTML and Javascript, if things like the DOM, object properties and "event binding" still lie far outside your comfort zone, you may want to wait a bit. There is a bit of a paradigm shift, so it's probably best to get very comfortable with the basics first. If you are a "pro" you've probably stopped reading this post and maybe cringed a bit at my take on this. I bet I could start a flame war with a comment on an all or nothing approach. :-) But I wont. It looks to me like hiding ALL of the code from the HTML makes it hard to understand what the hell will happen when you serve up a page.