I completely understand the first row without being very knowledgeable in JavaScript.

Because obviously the most important criterion for how to write a piece of code is whether it can be read by people who don’t know the library or the language. Or programming.

That depends on whether you are maintaining a site as a full time professional job, or (for example) running your own small blog and tweaking it every few months. Readability can in any case be considered an extremely important aspect of a language.

… and only a programmer would expect that “jQuery(document).ready(function() { … });” was readable by a non-programmer.

I completely understand the first row without being very knowledgeable in JavaScript.

Because obviously the most important criterion for how to write a piece of code is whether it can be read by people who don’t know the library or the language. Or programming.

jQuery(document).ready(function() { ... });

is much more readable than

$(function() { ... });

I completely understand the first row without being very knowledgeable in JavaScript. “When the document is ready, run the following function.” But the second row, I have no idea. Even knowing that $ accesses an element in the page doesn’t help much.

Second, I think the comment dates are confusing. It is much easier to parse them relative to now. That is, I know that the post is for example 3 weeks old and Brendan’s comment is 1 week old. It is not hard to figure out when he posted it relative to the original post. Now I need to take the time of the original post + the time of the comment to figure out when it was posted. It’s just not the time conversions you’re used to make.

Which is not to say anything against this post, your interest in solving this problem, or your own poor taste.

Leveraged synergy AND open kimono!

@marxy: Sorry I should have explained. Yes the reason for using JavaScript is to avoid re-rendering the page on the server side every time it is loaded. This also means that (in theory anyway) it can be cached. Mephisto used to do this nicely, but unfortunately Wordpress does not do this by default (but there is a plugin).

And not that I’ll be doing this, but JavaScript enables the possibility of dynamically update the page if you leave it open for hours/days at a time (again without re-rendering on the server).

You can go:

$(function() { ... });

instead of:

jQuery(document).ready(function() { ... });

Just looks nicer is all.