UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I am a beginner programmer/scripter. I have some knowledge of HTML (W3Schools Online Web Tutorials) and am looking at Javascript and Python. In todays dog-eat-dog world or scripting, I know that there is compatibility issues between Windows and UN*X and Mac, at least with javascript. I am soon to be taking a web design class in school, unfortunately it is design with minimal scripting, and I'll probably finish my projects early and will be very bored and I'll try to add interactivity to my sites using javascript and python. My question is, if I use normal javascript, will there be computability issues on a Windows box if i use javascript and not Jscript?
or just correct me if I'm not making any sense, which I'm probly not.

Perhaps you have to get your concepts clarified (or you did not phrase your post really well).

For Web development, there are two tiers: client- and server-side.

Content that are served to client side, such as HTML, Javascript, CSS and so on are interpreted by the client side, presumably a Web browser. So, there are various incompatibilities between various browser families, as well as among different versions of a given browser family. So, a single set of HTML/JS/CSS may render or behave differently with different browsers.

That does not bear much relationship to operating systems. Firefox of same version on Linux and Windows, for instance, very likely render a given document exactly the same. And the operating system of the server-side is irrelevant too. No matter the Web server is IIS on Windows or Apache on SunOS, that does not make any difference.

For server-side development, you create server-side scripts to generate content that are going to be interpreted by client side such as Web browser. Certainly, differences in server-side environment may lead to slight changes needed to scripts accordingly, but my experience with language environments such as JavaEE, Perl and PHP is that I generally do not need to worry about platform-dependency issues, unless you are using a lot of platform-dependent facility such as filesystems.

As for Javascript vs. Jscript, you need to understand that Jscript is Microsoft's stream of Javascript and is only supported in Internet Explorer. Javascript was conceived by Netscape but development effort now is mostly reflected in Firefox releases. Other browsers are mostly Javascript-based.

Actually a large subset of Javascript/Jscript language features is common among the mainstream Web browsers and consistently implemented. Beyond that, IE has some Jscript constructs that do not work on other browsers. The same holds for Gecko-based browsers such as Firefox. For the rest, such as Opera and Webkit-based (Safari, KHTML etc) mostly follow Gecko but lagging behind in the version of Javascript support.

Fortunately for us, that most Javascript developers (even the most advanced DHTML programmers alike) will not use the most bleeding-edge Javascript features. Therefore, Javascript incompatibility, in my opinion, is not much of a concern.

The major browser incompatibility today is DOM support. It deals with programmatic interactions with widgets in the document via a scripting language such as Javascript/Jscript (or VBScript, if using Internet Explorer). The DOM differs widely from browser to browser. However, since W3C started standardization of DOM the whole scene has been a lot improved, and a common set is gradually being picked up by mainstream browsers so if you stay within the bounds of the standard, chances are relatively high that that part of the DOM are quite consistently implemented.

W3C Document Object Model

If you happen to ask anyone who has programmed for IE4 and Netscape 4 before, they will tell you very well what it means by "browser incompatibility" in the dark ages.

Make sure you differentiate Javascript and DOM when you proceed then you ought to find your way a lot easier. Anyway, maybe this is too much information for you now.