MArcomage

I'm familiar with Javascript. We don't use it much for various reasons.

- first of all it is executed on the client side, so it really makes the webpage drain the user computer performance

- Javascript is quite messy - Javascript programs tend to be large and debugging is not as good as in php

- According to statistics many users have javascript support turned off for security reasons. This trend seems to expand with time.

Because of this if I would have to use Javascript, I would use it only for a supplementary functionality. If I would program a really interactive web appliaction I would probably choose AJAX instead of Javascript alone.

(Feel free to branch this off, if you wish)

1 and 3) In this day and age, I don't think there are many people using machines that can't handle some modest javascript. As for blocking javascript, I'm on the conservative side of that myself: I use the NoScript addon to block javascript. But of course, I add exceptions for all of my trusted sites, and Marcomage would certainly be among them.

If you look at the most popular, most-used websites around, there's javascript everywhere. Gmail, YouTube.. it's ubiquitous.

2) Have you ever tried using Firebug? It's a brilliant javascript debugger. Makes developing with javascript a total breeze.

Anyways, my comment was just some gentle ribbing, I don't pretend to know more than Mojko about web development. The impression that I've got though, is that developing sites in pure PHP is kind of old-fashioned (actually, you can give one of my professors this semester credit for instilling me with that prejudice - she thinks PHP is so dated that she's not even bothering to teach it, we're doing all our server-side scripting with CGI python scripts).

I'm familiar with Firebug, but I personally use Dragonfly (Opera). I think Opera is currently the best browser for web developer. PHP is old that is true. We actually considered moving to a different language - Ruby http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_(programming_language) a while ago.

My advice would be if you use PHP and can do everything you want with it do not change.

As for Opera I like it/use it (side by side with Firefox) but not all CSS standards are well handled in the actual version (10.10), but the new version alpha/beta version has that fixed :-)
Firebug and Dragonfly are very most similar.

Of course Javascript has some advantages and some disadvantages. One of then is that people could choose not to have javascript enabled and that has to be handled in a way that it will not allow wrong commands to be issued. Another one is browser compatibility and for that I would advice the use of JQuery. etc..

My main problem with deck building is to have a current list of cards/effects to study them(for now I use the xml file http://arcomage.netvor.sk/cards.xml )

[Branched of from 'Deck building' thread.]