Christian Heilmann

The seven rules of unobtrusive JavaScript

Monday, November 12th, 2007 at 11:39 pm

I’ve written a lot about unobtrusive JavaScript before, but I never really held a workshop about it. Well, now as part of the Paris Web Conference later this week in Paris, France I am giving one which is already sold out and I am very much looking forward to it.

As part of the workshop I prepared my materials and wanted to have a nice outline to follow. I took this as an opportunity to build up on the older materials and the outcome of this exercise is that I managed to define the rules of unobtrusive JavaScript, which are:

  • Do not make any assumptions
  • Find your hooks and relationships
  • Leave traversing to the experts
  • Understand browsers and users
  • Understand Events
  • Play well with others
  • Work for the next developer

I’ve explained them all in some detail here: The seven rules of unobtrusive JavaScript

After the workshop I will also add the code demos with some more detail, but that’ll be most probably after @media Ajax.

I hope this is helpful to you, it is creative commons, so use it for good.

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