For a long time, the Ajax Patterns had a big section of widgets, about 15 in all. This week, I’ve been working on full-text versions and they’ll be finished on the weekend. Writing the low-level details helped crystallise some of the relationships for me, and I’ve been able to break those widgets into three groups, which makes a bit more sense now.
So now the structure is this:
- Content Widgets
- Form Widgets
- Page Architecture, which will be renamed, it sounds too grandiose and overarching at the moment, whereas it’s really just more patterns at the same level as above.
Here’s what they contain - see the ajaxpatterns homepage for up-to-date info. (Excuse the cut-and-paste job).
Content Widgets
- Drilldown See http://betfair.com sidebar.
- Microcontent Compose the page of "Microcontent" blocks - small chunks of content that can be edited in-page.
- MicrolinkProvide Microlinks that open up new content on the existing page rather than loading a new page.
- Popup Support quick tasks and lookups with transient Popups, blocks of content that appear "in front of" the standard content.
- Portlet Introduce "Portlets" - isolated blocks of content with independent conversational state.
- Live Command-Line See Ajaxifying the Address-Bar Interface (http://www.ajaxian.com/archives/2005/05/ajaxifying_the.html).
- Live Form
- Live Search As the user refines their search query, continuously show all valid results.
- Query-Report Table Open Rico Data Table (also illustrates Never-Ending Page) (http://openrico.org/livegrid.page)
- Rich Text Editor e.g. wikipedia (http://wikipedia.com)
- Slider Yahoo Mindset Results (http://mindset.research.yahoo.com/search.php?p=ajax&prssweb=Search+the+Web).
- Suggestion Suggest words or phrases which are likely to complete what the user's typing.
- Drag-And-Drop Provide a drag-and-drop mechanism to let users directly rearrange elements around the page.
- Sprite Augment the display with "sprites": small, flexible, blocks of content.
- Status Area Variant: Preview e.g. Mail client (http://www.mirimar.net/mailbrowser/) showing message list and messages, Outlook style.
- Virtual Workspace Browser presents a portal into a larger workspace. e.g. Google Maps. Variant [Never-Ending Page] Page keeps adding results as you scroll further down. Open Rico Yahoo Example (http://openrico.org/yahooSearch.page). Incorporates[Panning And Zooming: e.g. http://maps.google.com. See http://mike.teczno.com/giant/pan/. Related: Predictive Fetch, Browser-Side Cache