chondle

Great read, but it seems like the article overlooks a few other pretty significant reasons for Javascript's current dominance: (a) jQuery and (b) Apple keeping Flash out of iOS made from the start.

Say what you will about the relative inelegance of jQuery, at the time of its release it certainly made JS--particularly DOM manipulation and AJAX--very accessible and cross-browser compliant. It definitely made articles like this seem quaint. [1][2]

At about the time of jQuery's release, Flash development was a viable alternative for smaller sites. I was doing bits and pieces of freelance around 2007 and after the iPhone came out, even my least tech-saavy clients stopped talking about Flash.

Pretty sure that these two bits made it so that every front end dev/ designer in the world was at least passably decent at Javascript by the time Node arrived.

[1] http://boxesandarrows.com/htmls-time-is-over-lets-move-on/ [2] Also, Mootools and Prototype and YUI etc, but jQuery is the one that became ubiquitous