Why is there no OFFICIAL JavaScript reference? [closed]

Answer 1

Any revisions of JavaScript pages on MDC by a member of the Mozilla Documentation team (like Eric Shepherd) is official. JavaScript is officially maintained by Mozilla so only documentation by Mozilla is official. The only engines that support JavaScript are currently made by Mozilla and every other engine implements ECMAScript. JavaScript and ECMAScript have quite a few differences (for example, the awesome let statement).

Answer 2

I really like Daniel Krook's apidoc, even though it could use some explanations and examples. I would really like to see a krook w3school mashup.

Answer 3

There is an official reference, it just isn't in a very convenient format. It is the ECMA-262 specification. It is a single, very large PDF document, instead of a searchable set of HTML pages.

Answer 4

I would say this one is the "official": https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript

You also have the ECMAScript Language Specification, 5.1 Edition (or as a PDF, the definitive specification).

And from Microsoft: JavaScript Language Reference: "This documentation explains the Microsoft implementation of JavaScript, which is compliant with the ECMAScript 5th Edition language specification. It also provides additional features that are not included in the Ecma Standards."

Answer 5

It's not like there is an official JavaScript release. All the browsers have made their own JavaScript engine - some are using the same though. But especially Internet Explorer has its own version that doesn't support a lot of what the other browsers support, making it very difficult to make a general JavaScript reference.

Edit:
While I know there is an official ECMA standard and development team, my point is that it doesn't really matter as long as browsers (Internet Explorer) doesn't live up to it. At the end of the day, clients want JavaScript to work for Internet Explorer too. They won't care about the ECMA standards, they just want it to work. This is where JavaScript libraries come into the picture, but that's another story.

It's the same issues with HTML and CSS, we can't use these tools for active development until:

• All browsers support them.
• We supply the browsers with code to make them support it.
• It's okay it doesn't work in all browsers.

Edit2:
Internet Explorer is getting close to the grave with the new browser project from Microsoft: Edge. This, however, doesn't really change the overall picture. We still have a lot if different browsers we need to support. Developers are constantly trying to push the boundaries of what's possible. This means that we often have this issue, some browser version we want to support doesn't support some feature of the standard (which usually is a bit fluid), which means we need to make some workaround or use frameworks that implement the missing built in features.