I just head from Asen Bozhilov that Richard Cornford has passed away [1]--- Synchronet 3.20a-Linux NewsLink 1.114
For those who don't know, Richard contributed significantly to the JavaScript ecosystem and body of knowledge during the wild-west days of the web.
His personal website has been saved to the internet archive:
<https://web.archive.org/web/20180722214324/http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/cornford/>
You can see his years of contributions to this group here:
<https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.javascript/search?q=author%3ARichard%20author%3ACornford>
He was one of the major maintainers of the original FAQ:
<https://www.jibbering.com/faq/>
and much more.
If you would like to share your favorite posts, articles, and more by Richard that impacted you it would be appreciated.
My favorite article was his discovery of a means to implement private static and protected members in ES3:
<https://web.archive.org/web/20180723025401/http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/cornford/js_info/private_static.html>
People take for granted how easy web development is today. Those of us who were doing it in the late 90s and early 2000s had to deal with significantly different and incompatible DOM implementations, and basic language and browser functionality not being available so you had to roll your own. Richard Cornford's contributions helped map out this new space and provide some stability upon which to rely and build upon.
[1] <https://twitter.com/abozhilov/status/1391491266962153474>
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