Web 2.0 Recipes With PHP + DHTML 134
An anonymous reader writes "Take a look at these full simple code examples for dynamic elements for your web apps, including: Ad boxes, Pop-ups, Spinners, and Tabs. Easy ways to show and hide content on the page." From the article: "Incorporating JavaScript into your page makes the page dynamic and creates a more compelling user experience. Users can get more data more quickly, look at information from different aspects, and seamlessly navigate the site -- and the site doesn't have to go back to the server for lots of pages. However, there's also a reason to avoid using JavaScript: browser compatibility. In the early days of flat HTML, Internet Explorer rendered pages differently from Netscape. Those problems were fixed, but when support for CSS was added, new compatibility issues arose. Now most of the CSS issues have been solved, but JavaScript compatibility issues have cropped up. These compatibility problems have no easy solution. You need to weigh the benefit of what the JavaScript is doing against the number of browsers you'll need to test against and support."
IE Script Warnings (Score:5, Insightful)
Search Engine Visibility (Score:5, Insightful)
Same goes for Flash...
I can't believe how many companies spent tens of thousands of dollars on a CMS package, or to a "web designer" that rendered them invisible to the search engines.
The article does recommend a fallback for unsupported browsers. Take this to heart, because "GoogleBot" is an unsupported browser.
How useful is this? (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh greaaaat... (Score:5, Insightful)
this is sad... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Oh greaaaat... (Score:4, Insightful)
Trust me, there is a strong demand for this stuff (it is in use already), and advertisers don't care how much it annoys you. In fact, it's been shown in our in-house studies that really annoying ads work better than ones that are not. This means, the more movement it has, and the more noise it makes, the more effective the ad will probably be. The solution? Convince everyone not to click on them. That would make them go away faster than anything.
The fact of the matter really is that people click on this stuff. More than you probably realize.
customer: overloaded variable. ambiguous. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wow (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't think it's that. It's just.. rehashed drek from other websites with a
Really, there is NOTHING new in that tutorial that hasn't been done on other beginner websites. Nothing here is really Web 2.0, it's just hiding divs. That was in Javascript a long time ago. There's no backend business, no combining with other technologies. No data being "fetched", no integration with a db, no real css stylings. Just.. "visible" or "hidden".
What the... (Score:3, Insightful)
Seriously, I'm not trying to troll, I'm genuinely at a loss for words here... how... what...???
Re:Cross-browser Flash. (Score:4, Insightful)
Flash!
Ah-aaaargh!
Seriously though. Flash is an awful choice. One the plus side, you get fairly consistent rendering. On the minus side it completely fucks up your entire interface. Middle-click to open in a new tab? Right-click to bookmark? Shift-click to open in a new window? Ctrl-F? Find-as-you-type?
Flash is great if you want to trade in the quality of the end result for ease of development. But I'd rather put a bit of effort in and get a decent interface rather than put little effort in and get crud. Crud that might look pretty, granted, but still a horrible, horrible interface.
Who the fuck wrote this?! (Score:5, Insightful)
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaahhh. My eyes are bleeding. What the fuck are you talking about?
In the early days of HTML, Internet Explorer did not exist.
Only IE and Netscape render pages differently?!
Most of the CSS issues have been solved?!? What?!
Javascript compatibility problems are new?@#$?@#$!?
Gimmicks vs. Usefullness (Score:2, Insightful)
From a practical point of view the information provided by the site in question is useless (not to take away from the efforts of those involved). The focus really should be on the convenient, useful aggregation of content, while providing ease of use for visitors to the site.
I was roped in by the "wowee zowee" stuff as IE battled Netscape in the 90's. Eventually we all realized that coding to the lowest common denominator was the key to creating a consistent, error free experience for our end users.
The bottom line is to make our sites useful. If done properly the sites can look great, be secure, provide great functionality and be compatible with all platforms. The caveat is that we remain at the mercy of browser quirks, making standards compliance a serious inconvenience for both users and developers.
This is the direction that emerging (AJAX, for example, is not new. It IS emerging) techniques and technologies should be focused on. Such a focus could cause new tricks to enhance compatibility/usefulness across platforms.
Thanks for letting me participate in the discussion!
CSS Issues Have Not Been Solved (Score:4, Insightful)
CSS compatibility issues have been worked around; they have not been "solved", and any quick trip through Position is Everything or A List Apart will show you that. JavaScript compatibility issues have also been around since the first days of JavaScript implementation in browsers.
Neither are going to "be solved", especially if Microsoft have anything to say about it. Right now, as in the past, implementation differences equal a certain degree of lock-in. The truth is that no rendering engine provides a complete, perfect-for-intents-and-purposes CSS2 implementation, and IE is easily at the bottom of that pack. Combined with its field dominance, it is largely responsible for "CSS compatibility issues".
IE 7 isn't going to provide a better rendering engine than Gecko, KHTML/WebCore, or whatever Opera's engine is called; it will simply address a list of the most important problems, such as the infamous box model fuck-ups. There will not be a "kickass" rendering engine in IE 7, and as much as I hate to say it, that's going to keep us in compatibility hack hell for the near future.
Now, if you ask me--and obviously you did, right, lol internet_rant--Microsoft have had more than ample time, people, and resources to produce a rendering engine on-par with Gecko and its peers. But that's not going to be the case. Only one reason for that.
CSS compatibility issues mostly solved? Not even close.
Re:Search Engine Visibility (Score:2, Insightful)
The CMS was installed and running for weeks but our client was still requesting modifications after modifications on the lay-out. HTML+CSS and nice visual. Nothing really wrong with it. Until that contract, Our lay-outs would only suffer few modifications before being accepted.
Their profile: a medium interior design company.
We were about to lose money. We spent more money on the lay-out than on the tool in itself. What's puzzled me is that Visuals were more important than the content for them. They couldn't care less about the newsletter module or the stat modules or the e-commerce module we have installed for their product. They didn't care that the space dedicated for the text (the content) was around of a paragraph's size. they wanted a beautiful web site. It should be beautiful, not efficient nor informative nor easy to update and google was a "detail" for them (the biggest source of new visits is a "detail")
So...We end up with a bet: Use FLASH, make a lot of fanzy animations, and see what happens.
Our clients were looking like kids to the "standard" animations you can get with the SWISH Max (89 Euro) software. That's probably the best investment I have ever done. 89 Euro have saved a 15K+ contract. They were extremely impressed, they tought that we have all spent a lot of extra hours to please them. In fact It took me with our poor web designer a couple of hours (To select some predined animations). We have also used another product called SWISHPIC to make FLASH pictures galeries...And that's it.
Within a week the Lay-out/web site was accepted.
We told them that witht his new technologies, they will have to pay us to update their picture galeries (no problem), that they would have to type twice the text to make newsletter (no problem), the homepage will be static and the menu too (strange for a CMS, isn't it) again no problem.
They live in another world.
FLASH has been made for customers like them.
Re:Hmmm.... (Score:3, Insightful)