I’m getting very frustrated and angry.

For those of you who don’t know, JavaScript is a programming language used in web pages. It can do little things like move the cursor to the next text field after you type in your credit card number, or it can do things like open new windows based on a user’s input.

Or it can be a miserable pain in the ass that won’t work no matter what you try to do.

For some reason, no one can agree on how to implement JavaScript in their browsers. Things that work fine in Internet Explorer won’t work at all in Navigator, and vice versa.

Most of the time, the browser will give me a message to the effect of: “Something is sorta wrong here, but I won’t tell you what it is. Have fun spending the next half hour searching for a missing comma, sucker.” The really fun ones don’t have messages. The browser just sits there, doing nothing and explaining nothing.

I’ve run into two of these so far today while trying to finish up my cousin’s website, and I have no idea what to do about them. A lot of the times, there isn’t anything wrong with my code! The browsers themselves are the problem! I don’t know that there is any other way to go about what I’m doing.

At this point, all I can do is stare at the damn screen, wonder what the hell is wrong, and attempt to squelch the urge to chug a bottle of whiskey.