Why is there no OFFICIAL JavaScript reference? [closed]

Answer 1

By “official”, I think you mean “written by the people responsible for JavaScript”.

Just speculating here really, but the people responsible for JavaScript (the ECMA) don’t directly make any money out of it, and probably don’t have any particular skills in writing reference documentation. So they have neither the incentive nor the ability to write a good reference.

Personally, I like JavaScript: the Definitive Guide from O’Reilly. There’s a sixth edition coming out in November.

Answer 2

Wikipedia's quotation:

Beginnings at Netscape

In November 1996, Netscape submitted JavaScript to Ecma International ...

JavaScript is officially managed by Mozilla Foundation ...

So, in my opinion, the ECMA is the standard and Mozilla is the official one.

Answer 3

If you're using ECMAScript for the web (which 99.9% of people are), then beyond the basics syntactics of the language (covered in the ECMA-262 spec mentioned above), what you're probably looking for is a DOM reference - which is the ECMAScript API that's used to interact with web documents.

I'm very surprised noone has mentioned the DOM api sofar. Current W3C DOM standard is here: http://www.w3.org/TR/DOM-Level-2-Core/

(btw, as for the naming confusion - ECMAScript is the name of the official standard, and "Javascript" and "JScript" are Netscape and Microsoft's proprietary "forks")

Answer 4

It is very difficult to have an "official" reference as long as there are implementations (in all browsers) and there is a specification (ECMAScript) but no conformance tests of implementations against the specifications.

Now though, we have the EMCAScript 5 conformance suite at http://es5conform.codeplex.com/ - and there seems some consensus that ECMAScript implementations will come closer together, making ECMAScript more likely to be the official reference for the language.

Answer 5

I find the old-school Netscape 4 JavaScript docs very useful for this purpose. Although they're obviously totally outdated, and some of the DOM features in them like Layers are long gone, for the language basics they're really solid.

That's because before the days of IE supremacy and ECMA standardisation, Netscape's JavaScript was the definitive JavaScript. Other browsers pretty much had to implement exactly what you see in those old docs.

They're also much easier to read than the ECMA-262 document, which even by the standards of standards documents is an absolute horror.

Answer 6

You can try with the official ECMAscript site,

http://www.ecmascript.org/

but the useful thing is actually the implementation of each browser.

I like this cheatsheet from Danny Goodman's JavaScript Bible a lot:

http://media.wiley.com/product_ancillary/12/04705269/DOWNLOAD/9780470526910_Appendix_A.pdf