Software As She’s Developed

A reader just mailed me about what I see as concerns with Ajax right now…what’s still worryng? Well, here are a few things off the top of my head… Accessibility is still a key issue, but more to do with if people bother to Ajaxify at all than if people break accessibility. If developers are required by […]

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Tableless forms are painful. Every time I start trying to create them, I wonder why I am going through the motions. Some vague sense that it will be “more accessible” and I’ll be able to tick an abstraction of a “web standards-compliant” box. But really, these table-less constructs are supposed to make page authoring easier, […]

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The good news is that an agreement has been reached on the Sitemaps protocol by Google, MS, and Yahoo! (via TechCrunch). The Google originally developed this protocol. The bad news is … who’s using it? Supposedly Sitemaps improves ranking, but a quick sample - techcrunch, digg, odeo - found 0 out of 3 using it (404s […]

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Welcome to Ye Olde Ajax Patterns Podcaste, the final in this series that began twelve months ago. 3+4+4+1 = 12 podcasts in all, covering 71 patterns (the 70 patterns in the the book as well as Dyanmic Favicons). Find them all on the podcast category - http://www.softwareas.com/category/podcast/ or subscribe to the podcast feed at http://www.softwareas.com/podcast/rss2. Thanks […]

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Ajax/Javascript: 8 Ways to Create Graphics on the Fly - digg this The ability to create rich graphics on the fly is one of the critical gaps in Ajax. There are indeed techniques to do it, albeit far from perfect, and some are do-able today if you take a pragmatic view of things and keep graceful [...]

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This is the fourth and final podcast in the series on Ajax functionality and usability patterns (Book: Part 4, pp 327-530). This 54-minute podcast covers seven patterns of Ajax Architecture (Book: Chapter 17, pp 473-530): Lazy Registration Direct Login Host-Proof Hosting Timeout Heartbeat Unique URLs Dynamic Favicons Dedicated to the Nitobians, whose last podcast inspired me to crank another one out again. Recent events [...]

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Ajax Design Patterns is Book of the Month in this month's .Net mag (p.23, Issue 155, October, 2006). Incidentally, the mag is about the 'Net, not specifically MS .Net (which it pre-dates). The review says: So AJAX might be the hottest thing in programming since, er, ordinary Javascript, but it's no good just learning how to [...]

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So you're coding a partial and you want to know which template has pulled it in. The magic word is "@first_render", which will give you something like "homepage/admin" for the homepage/admin.rhtml template. Trivial, I know, but I couldn't find any mention of it after much googling, so I decided to output self.inspect and was pleased [...]

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.... Wherein our protaganist awakes to the power of CSS ... CSS is as important to Ajax as Asynchrony and XMLHttpRequest. Which is to say, it's very useful, even though it's not essential. Due to an accident of the English language, JJG's creative mind, and the propensity of certain terms to rise to buzzdom, it doesn't [...]

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This is the third in the four-part series on Ajax functionality and usability patterns (Book: Part 4, pp 327-530). An audio discussion of visual effects is ideally short and sweet, so this podcast is but 13 minutes long. This 13-minute podcast covers ten patterns of Ajax Architecture (Book: Chapter 16, pp 445-472): One-Second Spotlight One-Second Mutation One-Second Motion Highlight Listen Now: [...]

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