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45-874: ECMAScript is commonly used for client-side scripting on the World Wide Web , and it is increasingly being used for server-side applications and services using runtime environments such as Node.js , deno and bun . ECMA-262 , or the ECMAScript Language Specification , defines the ECMAScript Language , or just ECMAScript . ECMA-262 specifies only language syntax and the semantics of the core application programming interface ( API ), such as Array , Function , and globalThis , while valid implementations of JavaScript add their own functionality such as input/output and file system handling. The ECMAScript specification

90-591: A de facto standard ; Since json2.js now implements features native to newer browsers into older browsers, it has become a polyfill instead of a library. ECMAScript 5th Edition ("ES5") brings some useful new scripting features, and since they're syntactically compatible with older JavaScript engines they can mostly be polyfilled by patching methods onto built-in JS objects. This es5-shim polyfill does it in two parts: es5-shim.js contains those methods that can be fully polyfilled, and es5-sham.js contains partial implementations of

135-539: A dynamic web page update using AJAX technologies will neither create a page to go back to, nor truncate the web browsing history forward of the displayed page. Using AJAX, the end user gets one dynamic page managed as a single page in the web browser while the actual web content rendered on that page can vary. The AJAX engine sits only on the browser requesting parts of its DOM, the DOM, for its client, from an application server. A particular application server could offer

180-479: A skin disease ." ECMAScript has been formalized through operational semantics by work at Stanford University and the Department of Computing , Imperial College London for security analysis and standardization. "ECMA" stood for "European Computer Manufacturers Association" until 1994. Ecma's Technical Committee 39 (TC39) is responsible for the maintenance of ECMAScript. New proposals to the language go through

225-821: A browser. Classical hypertext navigation, with HTML or XHTML alone, provides "static" content, meaning that the user requests a web page and simply views the page and the information on that page. However, a web page can also provide a "live", "dynamic", or "interactive" user experience. Content (text, images, form fields, etc.) on a web page can change, in response to different contexts or conditions. There are two ways to create this kind of effect: Web pages that use client-side scripting must use presentation technology broadly called rich interfaced pages . Client-side scripting languages like JavaScript or ActionScript , used for Dynamic HTML (DHTML) and Flash technologies respectively, are frequently used to orchestrate media types (sound, animations, changing text, etc.) of

270-404: A little bit more. Lea Verou 's -prefix-free polyfill is such a polyfill, allowing current browsers to recognise the unprefixed versions of several CSS3 properties instead of requiring the developer to write out all the vendor prefixes. It reads the page's stylesheets and replaces any unprefixed properties with their prefixed counterparts recognised by the current browser. Keith Clark's Selectivizr

315-542: A page. HTTP supports uploading documents from the client back to the server. There are several HTTP methods for doing this. Polyfill (programming) In software development , a polyfill is code that implements a new standard feature of a deployment environment within an old version of that environment that does not natively support the feature. Most often, it refers to JavaScript code that implements an HTML5 or CSS web standard , either an established standard (supported by some browsers) on older browsers, or

360-481: A posted HTML form , parameters in the URL , the type of browser being used, the passage of time, or a database or server state . Such web pages are often created with the help of server-side languages such as ASP , ColdFusion , Go , JavaScript , Perl , PHP , Ruby , Python , WebDNA and other languages, by a support server that can run on the same hardware as the web server. These server-side languages often use

405-487: A preliminary draft syntax for years. Flexie implements support for that same syntax in IE and Opera. However, the draft spec has undergone a drastic revision to a new (and much more powerful) syntax, which is not yet supported by Flexie. Flexie can still be used along with the old syntax, but the developer must make sure they include the new syntax for future browsers as well. PIE ("Progressive Internet Explorer") implements some of

450-569: A proposed standard (not supported by any browsers) on existing browsers. Polyfills are also used in PHP and Python . Polyfills allow web developers to use an API regardless of whether or not it is supported by a browser, and usually with minimal overhead. Typically they first check if a browser supports an API, and use it if available, otherwise using their own implementation. Polyfills themselves use other, more supported features, and thus different polyfills may be needed for different browsers. The term

495-406: A shim, is this: if you removed the polyfill script, your code would continue to work, without any changes required in spite of the polyfill being removed. This distinction is not drawn by other authors. At times various other distinctions are drawn between shims, polyfills, and fallbacks, but there are no generally accepted distinctions: most consider polyfills a form of shim. The term polyfiller

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540-480: A specific version can be configured according to need. Transpiling adds an extra step to the build process and is sometimes done to avoid needing polyfills . Polyfills create new features for older environments that lack them. Polyfills do this at runtime in the interpreter, such as the user's browser or on the server. Instead, transpiling rewrites the ECMA code itself during the build phase of development before it reaches

585-684: A staged process, with each stage representing the completeness of the proposal's specification. Consensus must be reached within the committee to advance a proposal to the next stage. Proposals that reach stage 4, the final stage, will be included into the next version of the standard. Since the release of version 6 in June 2015, new major versions have been finalized and published every June. The ECMAScript language includes structured , dynamic , functional , and prototype-based features. ECMAScript JavaScript supports C -style structured programming. Previously, JavaScript only supported function scoping using

630-422: A standardized REST style interface to offer services to the web application. DHTML is the umbrella term for technologies and methods used to create web pages that are not static web pages , though it has fallen out of common use since the popularization of AJAX, a term which is now itself rarely used. Client-side-scripting, server-side scripting, or a combination of these make for the dynamic web experience in

675-420: A static hosting service such as GitHub Pages or Amazon S3 as long as there is not any server-side code included. A dynamic web page is then reloaded by the user or by a computer program to change some variable content. The updating information could come from the server, or from changes made to that page's DOM. This may or may not truncate the browsing history or create a saved version to go back to, but

720-499: Is weakly typed . This means that certain types are assigned implicitly based on the operation being performed. However, there are several quirks in JavaScript's implementation of the conversion of a variable from one type to another. These quirks have been the subject of a talk entitled Wat . ECMAScript is dynamically typed. Thus, a type is associated with a value rather than an expression. ECMAScript supports various ways to test

765-584: Is a popular polyfill that makes many CSS3 selectors work in IE 8 and below. It reads the page's stylesheets looking for a number of known CSS3 selectors, then uses a JavaScript selector library to query the document for elements matching those selectors, applying the styles directly to those elements. It supports several JavaScript selector libraries such as jQuery . Possibly one of the most anticipated features of CSS3, Flexible Box Layout (a.k.a. Flexbox) promises to be an extremely powerful tool for laying out interface elements. WebKit and Mozilla engines have supported

810-542: Is a project of the Ecma Technical Committee 39 (TC39). The testing framework and the individual tests are contributed to Ecma by member organizations of TC39. Important contributions were made by Google ( Sputnik test suite ) and Microsoft, who both contributed thousands of tests. The Test262 test suite consisted of 38 014 tests as of January 2020. ECMAScript specifications through ES7 are well-supported in major web browsers . The table below shows

855-495: Is a standardized specification of a scripting language developed by Brendan Eich of Netscape ; initially named Mocha, then LiveScript, and finally JavaScript. In December 1995, Sun Microsystems and Netscape announced JavaScript in a press release. In November 1996, Netscape announced a meeting of the Ecma International standards organization to advance the standardization of JavaScript. The first edition of ECMA-262

900-698: Is also occasionally found. core-js is one of the most popular JavaScript standard library polyfills. Includes polyfills for ECMAScript up to the latest version of the standard: promises, symbols, collections, iterators, typed arrays, many other features, ECMAScript proposals, some cross-platform WHATWG / W3C features and proposals like URL . You can load only required features or use it without global namespace pollution. It can be integrated with Babel , which allows it to automatically inject required core-js modules into your code. In IE versions prior to 9, unknown HTML elements like <section> and <nav> would be parsed as empty elements, breaking

945-406: Is also used as a verb: polyfilling is providing a polyfill for a feature. The term is a neologism , coined by Remy Sharp, who required a word that meant "replicate an API using JavaScript (or Flash or whatever) if the browser doesn’t have it natively" while co-writing the book Introducing HTML5 in 2009. Formally, "a shim is a library that brings a new API to an older environment, using only

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990-413: Is also used to dynamically create pages on the server that are sent fully formed to clients. MediaWiki , the content management system that powers Misplaced Pages, is an example for an originally server-side dynamic web page, interacted with through form submissions and URL parameters. Throughout time, progressively enhancing extensions such as the visual editor have also added elements that are dynamic on

1035-482: Is based on the multipurpose filling paste brand Polyfilla , a paste used to cover up cracks and holes in walls, and the meaning "fill in holes (in functionality) in many ( poly- ) ways." The word has since gained popularity, particularly due to its use by Paul Irish and in Modernizr documentation. The distinction that Sharp makes is: What makes a polyfill different from the techniques we have already, like

1080-612: Is generated on the client's computer. The web browser retrieves a page from the server, then processes the code embedded in the page (typically written in JavaScript ) and displays the retrieved page's content to the user. The innerHTML property (or write command) can illustrate the client-side dynamic page generation: two distinct pages, A and B, can be regenerated (by an "event response dynamic") as document.innerHTML = A and document.innerHTML = B ; or "on load dynamic" by document.write(A) and document.write(B) . All of

1125-618: The Common Gateway Interface (CGI) to produce dynamic web pages . These kinds of pages can also use, on the client-side, the first kind (DHTML, etc.). It is difficult to be precise about "dynamic web page beginnings" or chronology because the precise concept makes sense only after the "widespread development of web pages". HTTP has existed since 1989, HTML , publicly standardized since 1996. The web browser's rise in popularity started with Mosaic in 1993. Between 1995 and 1996, multiple dynamic web products were introduced to

1170-402: The Common Gateway Interface (CGI) to produce dynamic web pages. Two notable exceptions are ASP.NET , and JSP , which reuse CGI concepts in their APIs but actually dispatch all web requests into a shared virtual machine. The server-side languages are used to embed tags or markers within the source file of the web page on the web server. When a user on a client computer requests that web page,

1215-639: The HTML5 MediaElement API, in older browsers using Flash or Silverlight plug-ins. It also provides an optional media player UI for those elements, which is consistent across all browsers. A JavaScript library created by Andrew Betts that implemented Polyfill. In February 2024, the library's domain was acquired by China-based company Funnull and within a few months became part of a supply chain attack . Authentication protocol proposed by Mozilla, failed to gain traction. Alexander Farkas's Webshims Lib aggregates many other polyfills together into

1260-412: The assembly of every new web page proceeds, and including the setting up of more client-side processing. A client-side dynamic web page processes the web page using JavaScript running in the browser as it loads. JavaScript can interact with the page via Document Object Model (DOM), to query page state and modify it. Even though a web page can be dynamic on the client-side, it can still be hosted on

1305-437: The client and server components that collectively build a dynamic web page are called a web application . Web applications manage user interactions, state, security, and performance. Ajax uses a combination of both client-side scripting and server-side requests. It is a web application development technique for dynamically interchanging content, and it sends requests to the server for data in order to do so. The server returns

1350-425: The client side, while the original dynamic server-side elements such as the classic edit form remain available to be fallen back on ( graceful degradation ) in case of error or incompatibility. A program running on a web server ( server-side scripting ) is used to generate the web content on various web pages, manage user sessions, and control workflow. Server responses may be determined by such conditions as data in

1395-497: The conformance rate for current versions of software with respect to the most recent editions of ECMAScript. Client-side scripting A dynamic web page is a web page constructed at runtime (during software execution ), as opposed to a static web page , delivered as it is stored. A server-side dynamic web page is a web page whose construction is controlled by an application server processing server-side scripts. In server-side scripting , parameters determine how

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1440-559: The interpreter. In 2010, Ecma International started developing a standards test for Ecma 262 ECMAScript. Test262 is an ECMAScript conformance test suite that can be used to check how closely a JavaScript implementation follows the ECMAScript Specification. The test suite contains thousands of individual tests, each of which tests some specific requirement(s) of the ECMAScript specification. The development of Test262

1485-571: The keyword var , but ECMAScript 2015 added the keywords let and const , allowing JavaScript to support both block scoping and function scoping. JavaScript supports automatic semicolon insertion , meaning that semicolons that normally terminate a statement in C may be omitted in JavaScript. Like C-style languages, control flow is done with the while , for , do / while , if / else , and switch statements. Functions are weakly typed and may accept and return any type. Arguments not provided default to undefined . ECMAScript

1530-469: The market, including Coldfusion , WebObjects , PHP , and Active Server Pages . The introduction of JavaScript (then known as LiveScript) enabled the production of client-side dynamic web pages, with JavaScript code executed in the client's browser. The letter "J" in the term AJAX originally indicated the use of JavaScript, as well as XML . With the rise of server side JavaScript processing, for example, Node.js , originally developed in 2009, JavaScript

1575-404: The means of that environment." Polyfills exactly fit this definition; the term shim was also used for early polyfills. However, to Sharp shim connoted non-transparent APIs and workarounds, such as spacer GIFs for layout, sometimes known as shim.gif , and similar terms such as progressive enhancement and graceful degradation were not appropriate, so he invented a new term. The term

1620-713: The most popular missing CSS3 box decoration properties in IE, including border-radius and box-shadow for IE 8 and below, and linear-gradient backgrounds for IE 9 and below. Invoked as a HTC behavior (a proprietary IE feature), it looks for the unsupported CSS3 properties on specific elements and renders those properties using VML for IE 6–8 and SVG for IE 9. Its rendering is mostly indistinguishable from native browser implementations and it handles dynamic DOM modification well. Douglas Crockford originally wrote json2.js as an API for reading and writing his (then up-and-coming) JSON data format. It became so widely used that browser vendors decided to implement its API natively and turn it into

1665-485: The other methods which rely too much on the underlying engine to work accurately. FlashCanvas is an implementation of the HTML5 Canvas API using an Adobe Flash plug-in. A rare commercial polyfill, it comes in a paid version, as well as a free version, which lacks a few advanced features like shadows. John Dyer's MediaElement.js polyfills support for <video> and <audio> elements, including

1710-483: The page's nesting structure and making those elements impossible to style using CSS . One of the most widely used polyfills, html5shiv, exploits another quirk of IE to work around this bug: calling document.createElement("tagname") for each of the new HTML5 elements, which causes IE to parse them correctly. It also includes basic default styling for those HTML5 elements. Though most polyfills target out-of-date browsers, some exist to simply push modern browsers forward

1755-641: The pages on the fly for each request. Client-side scripting is changing interface behaviors within a specific web page in response to input device actions, or at specified timing events. In this case, the dynamic behavior occurs within the presentation . The client-side content is generated on the user's local computer system. Such web pages use presentation technology called rich interfaced pages . Client-side scripting languages like JavaScript or ActionScript , used for Dynamic HTML (DHTML) and Flash technologies respectively, are frequently used to orchestrate media types (sound, animations, changing text, etc.) of

1800-532: The presentation. Client-side scripting also allows the use of remote scripting , a technique by which the DHTML page requests additional information from a server, using a hidden frame , XMLHttpRequests , or a Web service . The first public use of JavaScript was in 1995, when the language was implemented in Netscape Navigator 2 , standardized as ECMAScript two years later. The client-side content

1845-431: The presentation. The scripting also allows use of remote scripting , a technique by which the DHTML page requests additional information from a server, using a hidden Frame , XMLHttpRequests , or a web service . Web pages that use server-side scripting are often created with the help of server-side languages such as PHP , Perl , ASP , JSP , ColdFusion and other languages. These server-side languages typically use

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1890-508: The requested data which is then processed by a client-side script. This technique can reduce server load time because the client does not request the entire webpage to be regenerated by the server's language parser; only the content that will change is transmitted. Google Maps is an example of a web application that uses Ajax techniques. A web client , such as a web browser, can act as its own server, accessing data from many different servers, such as Gopher, FTP, NNTP (Usenet) and HTTP, to build

1935-421: The type of objects, including duck typing . Since ES 2015, transpiling JavaScript has become very common. Transpilation is a source-to-source compilation in which newer versions of JavaScript are used, and a transpiler rewrites the source code so that it is supported by older browsers. Usually, transpilers transpile down to ES3 to maintain compatibility with all versions of browsers. The settings to transpile to

1980-446: The web server interprets these tags or markers to perform actions on the server. For example, the server may be instructed to insert information from a database or information such as the current date. Dynamic web pages are often cached when there are few or no changes expected and the page is anticipated to receive considerable amount of web traffic that would wastefully strain the server and slow down page loading if it had to generate

2025-479: Was adopted by the Ecma General Assembly in June 1997. Several editions of the language standard have been published since then. The name "ECMAScript" was a compromise between the organizations involved in standardizing the language, especially Netscape and Microsoft, whose disputes dominated the early standards sessions. Eich commented that "ECMAScript was always an unwanted trade name that sounds like

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