The Web Standards Project today announced the formation of a DOM Scripting Task Force to help increase the use of the technique and establish best practices.

I’ve only tinkered in the world of DOM scripting, but it seems like something every front-end developer should know.

“The skillset of a front end programmer is a three-legged stool: structure (XHTML) is the first leg, presentation (CSS) the second, and behavior (DOM Scripting) the third,” said Peter-Paul Koch, a prominent scripting expert and one of the founders of the task force. “These three legs should be equal, but at the moment the behavior leg is the shortest, least-valued and least-understood of the three, even though the DOM has been a W3C specification for seven years and enjoys relatively solid browser support.”

There you have it folks. And I must agree, my third leg is the shortest.