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Update : thanks to Jon Wood aka jellybob , a prototype demonstration has been added, which is even better than my original jQuery btw as it degrades gracefully. Check it out in the ‘prototype-unobtrusive’ directory.
I am guessing 9 out of 10 of you reading the title is prepared for yet-another Rails drama on some obtrusive community members, and because everyone is tired of Rails dramas, I am risking that some of you won’t care to read the article – but I couldn’t resist :-). Actually I’d like to talk about usage of (un)obtrusive Javascript – why is it a bad idea to be obtrusive, especially given that (as you will learn from the article) writing unobtrusive Javascript is not harder, and you get the warm, fuzzy feeling
To demonstrate the differences, I’ll lead you through the creation of a quick AJAXy shout wall both the default/standard (and obtrusive) way, then do the same with unobtrusive Javascript to show you that contrary to the popular belief, you don’t need to memorize the “Tome of Javascript Black Magick Tricks” by heart, use obscure libraries or special coding techniques to achieve clean, unobtrusive code. The shout wall is simply a form for posting a new message, and a list of messages below it, like so:
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