Via Daring Fireball, Jeff Atwood talks about the rise of Javascript frameworks:

> But now something else is happening, something arguably even more significant than “JavaScript now works”. The rise of commonly available JavaScript frameworks means you can write to higher level JavaScript APIs that are guaranteed to work across multiple browsers. These frameworks spackle over the JavaScript implementation differences between browsers, and they’ve (mostly) done all the ugly grunt work of testing their APIs and validating them against a host of popular browsers and plaforms.

Not only do these libraries guarantee cross-browser compatibility, I’d go as far as to say that it’s the only way the current state of web front-end development could ever work. Browser developers – including the future space men of the Safari camp (seriously, check out the WebKit blog and see how much cool features they’re up on before anyone else) – could never keep up with the desires of web developers. Nor should they aspire to. The Javascript frameworks provide anchors for the browser developers to bake into their next version, as cool features for the web with enough clout behind them gets baked into the frameworks. The Javascript developers fake it today, make a reusable class of it tomorrow and the browsers eliminate the need for faking it a year or two down the line.

End result: browsers in general are stable (if a bit lacking in features for a JS developer) and the web is a fun target to program for. Did someone say Moo?