What is a dynamic page? It’s a page that can change, in response to the user, without having to be reloaded from the server. Javascript, of course, is the vehicle for this functionality.

For so long, 99% of what was seen done with javascript was gimmicky dropdowns and rollovers that I honestly assumed it had little other power. Rollovers (colour or image change when your mouse hover on a link) may be done with purely CSS, and far better mechnisms exist for menus, such as the widely celebrated Suckerfish Dropdowns, which contain a tiny piece of Javascript only to correct for IE’s broken CSS support.

I didn’t think I’d seriously ever need to learn much Javascript until I hit an interesting problem with Quickcook, early in its development. I realised that for someone entering a recipe, scrolling through all the ingredients on the site was an unacceptable way to find what they were looking for. So I devised this little demo page, which is a mock-up of the ‘ingredients’ portion of the recipe-adding system. Now, the paeg weight is only 8k, and there’s about 100 ingredients on the site, so that’s pretty good. But the idea of pre-downloading all the fish when someone’s making bread just doesn’t seem to click.

There’s been a lot of buzz on the web since Google launched Google Suggest a week ago. But even more in web-development circles — how do they do that? Because it actually sends data back to the server while you type, and returns results for the suggestion box, behind your back.

Just as a site like Wired News adopting standards is good for the web, so also is a high-profile company adopting a new technology like this. We’ll be seeing a lot of ‘live searches’ out there in the next little while, I expect. And when I finally have some time to work on Quickcook, there’ll be a few interesting features to try implementing.

For now, though, it sure would be cool if Mapquest worked the way this map does.

Mike ps– for those keeping track, the Algebra exam went very well yesterday. Just getting back to studying for Chemistry now.

← Earlier Later → Posted at 7:02 pm to Internet.