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Are there any official js docs anywhere? Who is behind js now?
The first client-side scripting was invented and implemented in the Netscape Navigator 2.0 browser in the mid-nineties. JavaScript was named so by the marketing geniuses at Netscape and Sun Microsystems (creator of Java), and currently the word "Javascript" is a trademark owned by Sun Microsystems, used under license by the Mozilla Foundation. Mozilla is basically a spinoff from Netscape; Mozilla started in 1998 with an open-source release of the Netscape code, and progressed from there. The Mozilla foundation creates free software [mozilla.org], including the ubiquitous FireFox [mozilla.com] browser, and the JavaScript interpreter named Rhino [mozilla.org] (which explains the Big Rhino on the cover of O'Reilly's Definitive Javascript Guide).
Note the absense of any mention of Microsoft in Javascript's origin story - their implementation of client-side scripting is not called "JavaScript" -- to avoid trademark issues their scripting language is offically called "Jscript", though in a dark alley on a foggy night you'd never know the difference between the two. Much of what we call JavaScript is the result of the intermarriage of innovations from both sides of the browser cold wars between Netscape and Microsoft. Microsoft, for example, invented the XHR object which makes AJAX possible. Kudos.
The chasm between JavaScript and Jscript prompted a fussy group of people to draft a standard named ECMAScript [ecma-international.org]. ECMASCript is named after the European Computer Manufacturers Association, and it's basically the standard definition of a language, of which Javascript and JScript are somewhat disrespectful dialects. ECMA is the "Esperanto" of scripting languages. Both JavaScript and JScript aim to be compatible with EMCAScript, while providing features not defined in ECMA or with each other.
The two languages are very similar, partly because both aspire to standardization with ECMAScript. But any experienced JavaScript programmer would be able to recite a few differences between the two. A beginning JavaScript scripter may explore happily for a few weeks, but will eventually encounter things that work in Firefox but not in Explorer, a first bitter taste of the agony of cross-browser scripting that is our lot.
Mozilla provides official JavaScript documentation here [developer.mozilla.org].
Microsoft provides official JScript documentation here [msdn2.microsoft.com].
ECMA provides official ECMAScript documentation here [ecmascript.org].
