The other day, I noted the Ajax Patterns widgets have been broken down into content, form, and page architecture. The patterns for those are now complete. Give me yellow! Yellow is the colour for full-text descriptions, and the bottom of the page is starting to look a nice shade of yellow.
There are full summaries for each pattern on the homepage too. So the upshot is there’s a description for each of these:
Content Widgets
- Drilldown To let the user locate an item within a hierarchy, provide a dynamic drilldown.
- Microcontent Compose the page of “Microcontent” blocks - small chunks of content that can be edited in-page.
- Microlink Provide 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.
Form Widgets
- Live Command-Line In command-line interfaces, monitor the command being composed and dynamically modifying the interface to support the interaction.
- Live Form Validate and modify a form throughout the entire interaction, instead of waiting for an explicit submission.
- Live Search As the user refines their search query, continuously show all valid results.
- Query-Report Table Report on some data in a table, and support common querying functions.
- Slider Provide a Slider to let the user choose a value within a range.
- Suggestion Suggest words or phrases which are likely to complete what the user’s typing.
Page Architecture
- 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 Include a read-only status area to report on current and past activity.
- Virtual Workspace Provide a browser-side view into a server-side workspace, allowing users to navigate the entire workspace as if it were held locally.
