Spoken

The Real AJAX Upside:

People like it because it’s snappy and responsive and lets you do nifty interactive stuff in the browser. But AJAX may be a big enough network-engineering win that the UI sparkle starts to look like a fringe benefit. Herewith some illustrations by example and a snicker at history…

[There is truth to this… but at least for me the change was that the bits and pieces that allow you to build an application that doesn’t live on the server is becoming more possible. It’s more the direction I thought Netscape was taking 1000 web years ago with all that bravura talk about taking down Microsoft (hah). It shouldn’t matter what OS or browser you run (double hah) but I should be able to deliver a nice application to you anywhere in the world.]
Source: Tim Bray

RiverNews Ajax etc..: Daniel Berlinger posted a working ajax demo with the newsRiver interface. So, I implemented it in the NewsRiver aggregator. Basically it will delete a story when you click on the checkbox using AJAX. [Cool. That is exactly what I hoped would happen… that someone would get inspired to take a step with this stuff. (Ummm. Don’t install the root, that’s no the “right” way to update things, but still it’s great that someone picked up the ball) That’s also why I’m working on “spindrift.js” which is a xml-rpc implementation with AJAX support built in… I should have a first release soon!]

How IE7 Can Avoid Irrelevance:

At a minimum, dynamic web apps need the following out of IE and JScript in the very near future:

• Memory leaks need to simply disappear
• Fix the cache+gzip bugs
• Give us getters/setters in JScript or give back watch()
• Fix the event object. Pass it in to DOM handlers by default. Also, offsetLeft and offsetTop are so ambiguious as to be useless. Give us currentTarget.
• Bump the limit on the number of concurrent HTTP connections if those connections are initiated after onload (either via XMLHTTP or other methods)
• Today, allocating more than 5K objects or so brings JScript to its knees. Object allocation cost needs to be O(1)
• Either revive (and start to fix) VML or give it an SVG-Tiny+DOM facade
• Give us a persistent, string-keyed, local cache in the MB range (5-10MB/domain seems a good start)
• Fast DOM queries. CSS selectors or XPath, we don’t care. Just give us a way to say “get us all DOM node objects matching this”
• A way to toggle the box model on a per-element basis without switching doctypes. The CSS 3 box model spec seems a good starting point

If Microsoft is to re-build any credibility around their browser, they need to show us the goods. CSS fixes won’t suffice this time around.

[No surprise that this list is to the point.]
Source: Continuing Intermittent Incoherency

Django adopts Dojo as Ajax framework:

Django, the Python “Web Framework for Perfectionists”, is bundling Dojo for Ajax with its 0.92 release, due in out in a few weeks. The initial integration will use Dojo in the admin interface of Django, but the toolkit will be available for any part of a Django app.

[Hmmm.]
Source: Ajaxian

Ajax and CSS Optimization:

The Zimbra team posted about how they compress and package their CSS and JavaScript for Ajax applications.

[Nice!]
Source: Ajaxian