jQuery, the Javascript framework, is like the ecstasy of web development: everybody’s doin’ it these days. (Well actually ecstasy was big in the 80’s, but a few months is like 25 in internet years. Just go with it.) When no two browsers seem to implement Javascript the same way, a framework is practically a necessity. But for a long time I held out and insisted on writing my own Javascript.

Why? Well, for starters, most of this site didn’t even use much Javascript, and the parts that did were only really important to one person: me. I used Konqueror as my main web browser, and its admittedly crappy JS support didn’t handle frameworks like jQuery correctly, so if I wanted the pages to work for myself, I had to write my own scripts. Besides, I wanted to support W3C standards. A simple way to do that is just to write code that conforms to the standard — at least, as well as anyone can tell what it means — so if you came to my site with a non-standard-compliant browser (*cough* IE *cough*) and it didn’t work, tough. Maybe it’d convince someone to use a better …