I have resisted for a long time to use Javascript in my Web projects, for two main reasons:
- it is relatively painful to write standard-compliant (read DOM-compliant) javascript;
- I’ve brainwashed myself to associate Javascript with accessibility problems.
I keep fighting myself on that second reason – the movement toward Graceful Degradation & Progressive Enhancement certainly helps me making peace with myself on that front. I guess some of my early Web experience where I ended up coding an entire Web site mostly in Javascript gnaws at my standardista conscience…
In terms of the pain in writing DOM-based scripts, and since I have re-started writing a bit of Javascript in the past two years, I must say that my recent experience with JQuery has been really good, and makes go away pretty much most of the pain of finding elements, looping through them, creating nodes, etc. It does bring a bit of syntactic awkwardness with all these lambda functions embedded everywhere, but overall, it makes coding in Javascript a pleasure rather than a dread!