Ajax and the Ken Burns Effect 239
An anonymous reader writes "IBM DeveloperWorks has an interesting project posted that shows how to design a client-side slide show using the 'Ken Burns Effect.' From the article: 'If the Web 2.0 revolution has one buzzword, it's Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Ajax). [...] Here, you discover how to build XML data sources for Ajax, request XML data from the client, and then dynamically create and animate HTML elements with that XML.'"
This is detailed Ajax, Ken Burns style... (Score:5, Informative)
"In his documentaries, Burns often gives life to still photographs by slowly zooming-in on subjects of interest and panning from one subject to another. For example, in a photograph of a baseball team, he might slowly pan across the faces of the players and come to a rest on the player the narrator is discussing. ... This technique came to be known as the Ken Burns Effect, even though he did not originate the technique, and has become a staple of documentaries, slide shows, presentations, and even screen savers."
Ken Burns effect in Ajax: Use good ole DHTML and XML to whip stuff around on your screen. Or as the link says "I animate the images with random slow moves, zooms, and fades to give a pleasing version of the Ken Burns Effect without having to download Macromedia® Flash or any other heavyweight animation tools."
Re:This is detailed Ajax, Ken Burns style... (Score:2)
Re:This is detailed Ajax, Ken Burns style... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This is detailed Ajax, Ken Burns style... (Score:2, Funny)
Dealing with a lack of material to work with... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:This is detailed Ajax, Ken Burns style... (Score:2)
Re:This is detailed Ajax, Ken Burns style... (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, the main reason is that 1) most TV viewers expect to see action rather than still images, and 2) a lot of Ken Burns's material either predates motion pictures OR was never captured on video media. It's common knowledge in the broadcast industry that most viewers a
Re:This is detailed Ajax, Ken Burns style... (Score:3, Funny)
But this sort of crap plays well with the big corporations that underwrite Burns's p
Re:I personally condemn Ken Burns... (Score:2)
Re:This is detailed Ajax, Ken Burns style... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:This is detailed Ajax, Ken Burns style... (Score:2)
Puke over IP or PoIP isn't scheduled to be released until Web 3.0.
Re:This is detailed Ajax, Ken Burns style... (Score:2)
Re:This is detailed Ajax, Ken Burns style... (Score:2, Troll)
Great. So now I have to sit through pointless slideshows on web sites instead of pointless Flash animations. That makes things so much better. I think I'll go back to reading books.
Why did you stop reading books? (Score:2)
Re:This is detailed Ajax, Ken Burns style... (Score:5, Insightful)
The point of the article isn't to entertain you with a slideshow. It's an intro guide/tutorial to AJAX for developers interested in the technique. Personally, I found the article to be very informative, and a good exercise for learning the basics of AJAX. Now I can go on and implement AJAX in the interface of my real web applications, which are much more complex and have a purpose other than to simply demonstrate how AJAX works.
It's kinda like when you first start programming you might begin with a simple "hello world" program. That doesn't mean C/Perl/whatever language you're learning is useless just because the hello world application was designed as a simple programming exercise.
So you can stop complaining everytime AJAX is mentioned. If you're not a web developer, then it might not interest you, but that doesn't make it pointless; you just don't have any use for it. Instead of looking for stupid things to complain about, just skip the article and go read your books or something.
Re:This is detailed Ajax, Ken Burns style... (Score:2)
Actually it does - at least now the pointless slideshow isn't sucking 60% CPU.
Re:This is detailed Ajax, Ken Burns style... (Score:2)
Re:This is detailed Ajax, Ken Burns style... (Score:2)
Now I'll get my rant on . . . (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Now I'll get my rant on . . . (Score:2)
Re:Now I'll get my rant on . . . (Score:2)
Ajax and the Mr. Burns effect.... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Ajax and the Mr. Burns effect.... (Score:2)
Buzzword compliance? Check (Score:3, Insightful)
Yet another thing XML complicates... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Yet another thing XML complicates... (Score:3, Insightful)
AJAX does not require XML (Score:2, Insightful)
In practice, AJAX means Asynchronous JavaScript And XMLHttpRequest. Nothing in the XMLHttpRequest [wikipedia.org] object's interface requires that the retrieved data be XML; it could be in other notations such as CSV or JSON.
Re:Yet another thing XML complicates... (Score:2)
Re:Yet another thing XML complicates... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Yet another thing XML complicates... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Yet another thing XML complicates... (Score:2)
Now write me out 100 lines of <deny action="question" subject="buzzwords"
Re:Yet another thing XML complicates... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Yet another thing XML complicates... (Score:2)
1) The data you are using might not live on your server. (You could certainly write server side code to connect to the external server).
2) The Asyncronous bit. You're moving away from the idea that the server creates and delivers HTML to the idea that a server delivers data and the application renders it - i.e. back towards a client-server architecture. Using the wrong tools, but we don't really have a lot of choice in that.
Re:Yet another thing XML complicates... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Yet another thing XML complicates... (Score:2)
For legacy sites, your argument is valid. However, given that HTML is just a rule-breaking XML, I don't quite see what the fuss is about.
If I'm using AJAX for something useful,
Because XML keeps the server side generic (Score:2)
Now, if you are writing somthing to serve your kids' photos to grandma and you know she will only view it on your webpage, then you can get away without u
Risk the Client PC's Limitations ? Not yet ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Risk the Client PC's Limitations ? Not yet ... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Risk the Client PC's Limitations ? Not yet ... (Score:2, Insightful)
Processing everything server side [...] dont you think ?
No :p
Available processing power of the client is the same when several clients access the web page.
Available processing power of the server degrades with the number of clients...
You must know you're target audience, and send most of the job you can to them (never trusting them), or by your logic, why send HTML, you better render it and send it as an image so that the client don't spend time prossecing all those HTML tags :p
This is very true (Score:5, Interesting)
Render the page server side as an image? So you presume the client has image capability?
I think that for to long we have tried to include everyone. Bending over backwards to support crap browsers with broken functions just to make sure nobody was left behind. Well fuck it. At a given point you must just be able to say, "upgrade or our site won't run".
If you don't the price is going to be that other people can move ahead and use new technologies while you are stuck with an ever dwindling but always present group of people who still use the same software from a decade ago.
Ask yourselve if this is normal in the real world.
Old cars can't run on modern petrol. Yet how many gas stations keep an old pump around for cars from before WW2? Try to get some polaroid film from your average camera store. A lp player from a highstreet electronics store.
Get the picture? So why on earth are we still worried about people using browsers 2 generations out of date.
Re:This is very true (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, you need to separate "backward-compatibility" from "downward-compatibility." The latter is, IMO, the more important of the two. The difference I am getting at is that backward-compatibility concerns a protocol change that breaks or is not supported by older browsers, whereas downward-compatibility concerns an interface capability requirement that can't be worked around by a software upgrade.
There are users who can't use nifty features for a lot of reasons. Blind users have a hard time with web pages that don't render well in text mode for a screen reader or Braille "display." Users on a handheld device have limited screen area and processing power. I myself often use a text mode browser on a brand new PC before I get X up and running. If your web site can be useful to these people, then it's worth being downward compatible.
Backward compatibility is, IMO, a bit less of a must-have, but I still would advocate maintaining it unless it's a serious hardship. Not many web sites need or are even improved by these new technologies. There are exceptions, but I find that advanced HTML rendering techniques often make sites *less* usable to me. Arguing "upgrade or die" to support something that's "cool" rather than something that's "useful" seems like a poor policy.
Your examples of gasoline and Polaroid film fall into this backward-compatibility category. Gasoline is not a great example for this discussion because there is good reason to actively discourage people from using the older more dangerous formulations. Still, pragmatically, at some point there just isn't enough demand for something to warrant continuing to provide it. I think it's worth trying to keep things compatible if you can.
And I don't know that I've seen many cases of people "bending over backwards" for compatibility. Most places, IMO, don't do nearly enough of it.
Polaroid film and LP players (Score:2)
Our local CVS pharmacy, on Nahatan Street (which is the "high street" of my population-30,000 U. S. burg) does carry Polaroid film. Two kinds, in fact: Polaroid 600 and Polaroid SX70.
The last time I checked, the local Best Buy carried not one but two LP turntables... AudioTechnica and Sony if I remember correctly. And our local Radio Shack has LP cartridges. I haven't seen an LP "player" in the flesh, but I get a number of mail-order catalogs that offer functi
Re:This is very true (Score:2)
I'm by no means saying that that's the level browsers in mobile devices are today. That's obviously the absolute latest and greatest. But it shows where things are headed. It's Safari based, supports HTML 4.01, XHTML 1.0, with full support for JavaScript (including AJAX-stuff), frames, forms, etc. etc.. Hell, it even supports SVG and Flash, as well as the Netscape plugin API. Most devices that will feature that browser (or feature it already) have screen resolutions of QVGA or high
Re:This is very true (Score:2)
Perhaps not javascript, but cookies are commonly used to maintain state between requests or to keep track of the login status of the current session. There are only so many ways to maintain state in a browser session, for all the hype over browser based applications, and with URLs limited to 256 characters or less than what are you going to do? It nev
Re:Risk the Client PC's Limitations ? Not yet ... (Score:2)
Re:Risk the Client PC's Limitations ? Not yet ... (Score:2)
Re:Risk the Client PC's Limitations ? Not yet ... (Score:2)
I'm not aware of any anti-spyware, virus etc issues with Ajax that wouldn't also impact a normal http get request or other Javascript.
With Ajax, using it to update a part of a page instead of the whole page, you get less load on both the server, the connection and the client. I like it, in principle. Some effects just aren't possible to do in a usable way if you need to re-generate and transfer the whole page for every little update.
It certainly has problems, though - it messes with conventional navigatio
A policy of noscript (Score:2)
I'm not aware of any anti-spyware, virus etc issues with Ajax that wouldn't also impact a normal http get request or other Javascript.
Unless, as is the case in some institutional IT installations, an overzealous proxy or group policy set on the web browser blocks all scripts from executing. What alternate content do you have in your applications' pages' noscript element?
all in all, I prefer Ajax to abuses of Flash
So if the user requests audio feedback for specific operations, or I want to make a s
Re:A policy of noscript (Score:2)
HTML itself does allow for audio. It's not nice, but you could do it, without flash.
Re:A policy of noscript (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Risk the Client PC's Limitations ? Not yet ... (Score:2)
It is not unacceptable to require users to be able to view CSS2, HTML 4, Javascript 3, and DOM1. These things are all old tech at this point - with well established standards with many years to have evolved, and supported by almost all of the market.
This isn't even about IE versus NS. You support the standard of those things I said, and your stuff will work on anything that's 6 years old or newer.
What
CSS2? IE fails it (Score:2)
It is not unacceptable to require users to be able to view CSS2 [which is] supported by almost all of the market.
Among web user agents that run natively[1] on Microsoft Windows, a beta version of Opera is the only one that provides a reasonably complete implementation of CSS2. The others, including the latest releases of the top two (Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox), fail the Acid2 test. In fact, IE fails much more basic CSS2 tests.
[1] Here, I define "natively" to exclude cygwin1.dll,
Re:CSS2? IE fails it (Score:2)
I sure wish the webstandards.org guys would place a notice atop the test page, in big red letters, "THIS IS NOT A COMPREHENSIVE STANDARDS COMPLIANCE TEST"
*RANT* I personally suspect alot of supposed Opera breakage is just legend from old versions and poor understanding, or testing of, standards by web designers. It's annoying
Google agrees with you , this is why Gmail.... (Score:4, Informative)
* Filter creation
* Settings (Including Forwarding and POP)
* Spell checker
* Keyboard shortcuts
* Address auto-complete
(from http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answ
Google really sets a fine example here by letting users choose what kind of interface they prefer , even though they could easily just ignore these users, as I personaly dont know anyone that uses this feature . Making a dual interface for AJAX applications on all these fluffy Web2.0 sites is a good idea , specially for mobile/light clients like that 100$ laptop [mit.edu]
Re:Google agrees with you , this is why Gmail.... (Score:2)
Re:Google agrees with you , this is why Gmail.... (Score:2)
None of those features need AJAX per se, but an AJAX interface enhances their usability, and in the case of auto-complete, is the only real elegant way to implement it.
I've developed tons of web applications without the use of AJAX too in the past, but I can recognize the potential benefits of an AJAX interface. So rather than dismissing it off hand because it's become fashionable on Slashdot to bash anything Web 2.0-related, I'm learning as much as I can about AJAX so I can implement it in my next projec
Re:Risk the Client PC's Limitations ? Not yet ... (Score:2)
What risk are you talking about? It's perfectly possible to have fancy Ajax effects that degrade gracefully when the client can't handle them. You don't have to choose between Ajax and backwards compatibility.
The only risk is if you're a middle manager who isn't going to be doing the actual coding, and you don't know whether your developers are in the 10% who know what they are doing or in the 90% who copy the multitude of bad examples out there. And if you're in that position, I'd say you've already
Re:Risk the Client PC's Limitations ? Not yet ... (Score:2)
Re:Risk the Client PC's Limitations ? Not yet ... (Score:2)
Exactly. There seems to be a lot of arrogant, short-sighted web developers on Slashdot who have started a trend of bashing on anything Web 2.0-related. Most of the web services/applications the term describes are of pretty high complexity having taken many years to mature, and many innovative technologies/techniques have thus been developed in the processes of creating these second generation web applications and services. But a lot of Slashdotters can't seem to get over the superficial image of the 'buzzwo
What about embedded web servers? (Score:2)
What I like about AJAX is the possiblility for improving content served up by small embedded systems. I have a simple web server on a piece of telco exchange equipment ( running threadX + interniche tcp/ip & webserver ) that can ju
Re:Risk the Client PC's Limitations ? Not yet ... (Score:2)
The Headline Says "Ken Burns Effect" (Score:5, Funny)
Tom
Ken Burns effect? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Ken Burns effect? (Score:2)
There are a lot of "Web 2.0" buzzwords... (Score:3, Insightful)
Coolest Ajax UI Ever (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Coolest Ajax UI Ever (Score:2)
It's so simple.
Where's the source, though?
When's the Object Oriented AJAX coming out? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:When's the Object Oriented AJAX coming out? (Score:2)
http://prototype.conio.net/ [conio.net]
It's developed for ruby on rails, but can be used with any cgi language I guess.
I admire the coding, but... (Score:4, Informative)
I'd guess this is due to inefficiencies in the browser itself. I've seen similar issues when I've played around with animating multiple text objects (moving, resizing, and changing opacity) in the past.
If you want animation, use Flash (Score:3, Interesting)
Now here's a good Flash animation. [cartoonnetworkla.com] Try doing that with "Web 2.0".
Re:If you want animation, use Flash (Score:2)
Re:If you want animation, use Flash (Score:2)
(former Flash animator/director.)
what is wrong with this picture? (Score:4, Insightful)
it's tough to show you what this looks like in a browser, when i'm plainly viewing it... WITH A BROWSER?
wtf?
Ridiculous waste of my time... (Score:2)
Basically, this guy uses Ajax to download the list of images from the server, then uses DHTML to move them around the page.
Whoop-dee-do. It's like something that could have been done in 2000.
This is the stupidest example of Ajax I have ever seen. You use Ajax asynchronously to fetch ocuments on demand in order to reduce page reloads - you don't use it to download a 1kb list of images from the server you will only be using once during that page load.
Ajax is a useful technology (I use it often), but this
Re:Ridiculous waste of my time... (Score:2)
Yup. In 1995 we've had bunch of stupid ideas like "selling dog food on the web!". Now we have "selling dog food, on the web, with AJAX!".
WHERE'S THE DEMO??? (Score:3, Funny)
Are there any examples of this in action?
Re:WHERE'S THE DEMO??? (Score:2)
Re:WHERE'S THE DEMO??? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:WHERE'S THE DEMO??? (Score:2)
Re:WHERE'S THE DEMO??? (Score:2, Insightful)
Term coined by Steve Jobs haha (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Term coined by Steve Jobs haha (Score:2)
That effect was referred to as the Ken Burns effect off and on even then, which was 12 years ago.
The term "pan and scan" has nothing to do with the ken burns effect. Pan and scan is specifically used in the industry (and solely used, in my experience) to refer to th
They do it all wrong! (Score:3, Informative)
I've taken the dive into Ajax recently to do dynamic in-page searching. For a web-app I develop for my work, on a particular page the user needs to select a client (from the thousands we have in our database). I have a spot on the page where they can provide search criteria for the client they want to select. I perform the search with Ajax, display the results, and the user selects which client they want to pick.
I've found the the step of displaying the results can be slowest step. At first, I had the Ajax function return a JSON associative array containing the data. I would then loop through it and create the HTML I needed through Javascript (much as they do in the linked example).
However, if something along the lines of hundreds of records were returned, the client's browser would freeze for a period of time (depending on the performance of the client's machine) while generating that HTML. This became unacceptable.
The superior way to display the results is with XML transformations. Beleive me, it's a monumental difference, and if you're doing something like I was, you should look into it. Have the Ajax function return XML, then use an XSLT style sheet to transform those results into the HTML you want to display. It's super fast, and worth the trouble.
Re:They do it all wrong! (Score:2)
Where did the Javascript Haters go? (Score:3, Interesting)
We've read this a thousand times in a thousand stories, only fools let javascript operate despite all the incredible things it can do.
BUT
What a bunch of buzzword suckers you all are.
AJAX is nothing new, its just a name for using a certain javascript technique.
Re:Where did the Javascript Haters go? (Score:2)
Re:Where did the Javascript Haters go? (Score:2)
No Execute and stack cookies FTW.
Melissa
perhaps not relevant (Score:2)
Beyond My Ken (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You hoo... Ed Tufte? (Score:4, Insightful)
This is a silly demonstration of technology for technology's sake.
what I never hear about web 2.0... (Score:3, Interesting)
Think about it from the perspective of a blind man. His screen reader presents the content to him. He makes a choice or otherwise interacts with it. AJAX jumps in and dynamically changes a bit in the middle of the page. Now...how does he know it was changed? Answer? He doesn't. He's excluded by default from this whole "Web 2.0" thing.
I'm not interested in bringing everyone's experience down to the lowest common denominator, but it's getting kinda bad for people who need 508 compliance [section508.gov] just to be a part of this great new medium.
If it were some remote corner of the web, I'd keep my mouth shut, but as more sites move to AJAX content, they cease being 508 compliant. And this is a very recent phenomena. Until AJAX (for the most part), the web was essentially static. Changes to a page initiated a postback event and the screen reader was thus informed that a change had occured. Not so anymore.
This was sort brought to my attention recently as I am redoing a
We need to either drastically improve the screen reader technology or make ourselves more aware of the poeple we exclude with these "advances".
Disclaimer: Yes, I know that "Web 2.0" is not directly about AJAX but rather about collaboration, but AJAX is the preferred technology used to implement said collaboration.
Tom Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/ [digitalelite.com]
Re:what I never hear about web 2.0... (Score:2, Informative)
Having said this, people always jump on the "AJAX isn't accessible" bandwagon, which is plainly a load of crap. My AJAX apps work fine in all the popular screenreaders. How does a user know the information has changed? Provide an option for the user to turn on change notifications, which show an alert() when the page is updated.
Ken Burn's Screensaver - iSlideshow (Score:2)
Re:First Post (Score:5, Funny)
This is poor advice. First you GET. Did you even look at the article?
Alan
Re:damn you ajax (Score:2)
I blame them for telling the clients "oh we can do anything" when they don't understand the limitations of the technology.
Re:damn you ajax (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Mac screen shots? (Score:2)
Re:All The Buzzwords in Web 2.0 (First Edition) (Score:2)
That's no float; it's fixed!