I've never actually been working with JavaScript much.

With all those modern frameworks like JSF-based RichFaces and some GWT-based libraries(e.g. Vaadin) you don't actually need to do a lot of JavaScript coding.

And even if you do all these issues with cross-browser support and layout looking similar in all browsers tend to make you hating anything related to UI.

Thus you start being arrogant and ignorant to JavaScript, CSS, HTML features and focus on learning something solid like Java/JEE etc.

Of course if you had no options(e.g. you worked on a browser-based MMO game or a web portal with a rich UI) you would probably keep working with UI technologies, but in many cases you could still keep your heart cold about JavaScript and kept waiting for an oportunity to escape.

Recently a friend of mine has sent me a good link about JavaScript which I wished everyone who'd ever developed in JavaScript read.

Here it's by the way: A re-introduction to JavaScript (JS Tutorial)

Once I read it I also found several other extremely useful links from the same source:

Introduction to Object-Oriented JavaScript

JavaScript Guide

I think there are also some other sources on the Internet on this matter so that if you get interested you can find them as well.

The key point of this post is "JavaScript is not just some kind of buggy/ugly thing you have to write when you need to extend your web UI but rather a technologigy which is intended to be run on a host environment and has a lot of great and flexible features(its own paradigm of programming I would even say)".