This is broken now that I’ve moved to WordPress! Now come back in a few hours and see if that greeting has changed. I made up (re: stole) a dealie that makes it change based on the time of day. Hopefully it works right.
The point of this exercise -aside from seeing how little function you can get from as many lines of code as possible- is to play with JavaScript a bit today. The code I used is really not complicated at all, but it took me almost half an hour to get that greeting to the point where it would show up on the page. I don’t much care for JavaScript; I cannot foresee any reason why I would use it. Alas, to learn XSLT properly, one must also know XML. And to learn XML, a firm grasp on JavaScript is highly recommended. So today I’m learning about JavaScript. It’s going slowly.
I don’t really think that it’s useless or anything. It’s just like, I’m reading and there’s these cool things you can do but then I turn around and realize that there’s no reason to. Sure I could put a self-updating time stamp on the site, but why bother? You’re probably reading this on a computer, and the time and date are right there on the bottom-right corner of your screen. I can do algebra on my page with JavaScript, but I cannot imagine any situation where it would be useful. Even if/else is just if/then’s dropout cousin for webpage content. I’d make stuff up just for the sake of learning it, but really, that would amount to making homework for myself. Mind you, I’m in the JavaScript tutorial equivalent of kindergarten, so maybe there’s better stuff beyond the horizon.