On Fri, 2007-02-16 at 23:56 +0200, Quim Gil wrote: > Excuse if I don get into details, some of the technical aspects escape > to my knowledge (i.e. why AJAXś javascript is "worse" than E5's JS)
This issue is not AJAX verses JavaScript. The issue ultimately is if JavaScript is required for the user experience, and how robust must it be. EcmaScript is a standard, but no browser has been perfect at implementing it. Every browser has proprietary additions. Successful JavaScript implementations test for features before using them, provide implementations for missing features, and offer some form of graceful degradation when implementations are not available. Just three years ago, it was very difficult to make a sophisticated and reliable JavaScript app because every micro release of a browser broke API compatibility with the previous release. The problem was compounded by the CSS engine, which JavaScript uses to accomplish the in-page effects. The success of AJAX is ultimately derived from proven (almost paranoid) cross browser and cross engine testing. Libraries like Prototype + Scriptaculous or JQuery, provide tested features and effect that do work in IE, Moz, KHTML, Safari, and Opera. Other browsers are not guaranteed, and if they must be supported, then additional labor is need to update the browser and/or the AJAX library. As an aside, a lot of so called AJAX is nothing more that dynamic HTML since there is no asynchronous requests for data. Using JavaScript means we are committing additional time to develop, test, and maintain. Authors must know what CSS ids and classes to apply to their content to enable a feature. Developers must create scripts that know when to wire their event handlers to those CSS ids and classes (and when not to). Authors generally do not require anything more interactive that hyperlinking. Applications like browsing and searching through structured data will be more usable if the interface is more responsive, and illustrative of how information is organized. All that said. JQuery or Scriptaculous can do some astounding sweet effects and compelling functions that do not require plugins. You can make amazing presentations that include cross-fading and moving that look like GL-based composting. An adept developer can use these libraries to do a selection and transition in a single line of code. PS, remember that many people ask search engines before asking gnome.org. We should not permit our data and functions to lock out bots just because they are blind idiot savants without JavaScript or CSS. > My points are: > > - Whatever we do needs to be easily editable via the CMS. > > - Whatever we do needs to fit in http://live.gnome.org/GnomeWeb/WebPolicies > > - We can start doing something simple but effective that can be ready > for the launch. Then with a website already launched we can work on > improvemts without this time pressure. Working from scratch without > further references and with a tight deadline it's too unpleasant. > > - Anyway the most elaborated tour we could imagine will need some > static pages to start discussing a build upon. Perhaps by now we don > need anything else than these static pages. > -- __C U R T I S C. H O V E Y____________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Guilty of stealing everything I am. _______________________________________________ gnome-web-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-web-list
