Alternatives to JavaScript

Question

At the moment, the only fully supported language, and the de-facto standard for DOM tree manipulation in the browser is JavaScript. It looks like it has deep design issues t

Answer 1

Doug Crockford gave a talk to Google detailing the bad and good parts of JavaScript and its future. It actually hasn't changed much at all since 1999--which can be said to be a good thing (pretty much all browsers can run the same code as long as you're aware of their limitations) and Doug shows where the good parts were mostly misunderstandings that turn out to be very powerful.

For DOM manipuluation, look at JQuery as a client-side library that replaces most of the awful DOM API with operations that are a pain to write to pretty elegant bits of code that are easier to write.