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Don't bother with a book: W3Schools has got you covered.

I've been developing AJAX for almost a year and still haven't figured out why my IE throws JS Errors when i try to use responseXML when it works fine in Mozilla / Others.

I've searched and searched and haven't received a satisfactory answer. Can SlashDot help?
NB Here is the responseXML in action:
http://w3schools.com/ajax/ajax_responsexml.asp

Thanks

How well do you know javascript?

As someone else pointed out, XMLHTTPRequest is what makes AJAX tick. But without knowing Javascript, what are you gonna do with it?

Assuming you are very good with javascript, here are two resources for you. 1 will help you see what the XMLHTTPRequest object does. 2 will help you tame it a bit and abstract things.
[1]: http://w3schools.com/ajax/default.asp
[2]: http://www.prototypejs.org/learn

The thing is, the AJAX bit is a very small part of the total AJAX package. Then you'll need to learn JSON (a good data interexchange format) and how to use Javascript to create elements.

There, now that I have provided what you asked for and not just some smart alek remark about how you need to google it, this has to be said...If you seriously expect to master a useful skill in an afternoon, then you have some expectation issues. If there's one thing life has taught me, it's that something worth having doesn't come in a day, and if it does come in a day, it's probably not worth much. Did you learn to program in one day? No? Then why would you expect to learn a complex object and a totally new technique for making web applications on one day? But if you really want to learn then you'll thank me for those links later when your web development reaches the next level. If you are just bashing AJAX with a cudgel of ignorance, then you'll ignore those links and keep griping about AJAX being too hard. I guess time will tell.

here's a good intro. this assumes you have a file time.asp on your site that just outputs the time.

if, instead, time.asp outputs an XML file, in the code change .responseText to .responseXML, and from that you can use DOM functions (e.g. xmlHttp.responseXML.getElementsByTagName("time")[0].childNodes[0].nodeValue.

Mac 4%

up 2% since March 03

it would be difficult to argue that there has been any significant change in the Mac demographic in the last twenty years.
lately, Apple has been aggressively promoting the Mac's ability to run Windows apps through Boot Camp and viritualization. to me that suggests a company that is being coldly realistic about its place in the PC market.

Linux 3%

up 1% since March 03

Vista 6%

up 6% from January 07

OS Platform Statistics {October]

If you consider the 50/50 split, you end up with some sites where no single version of IE matches FF. Oh yeah, that's a developer site and it kind of shows you where this is all going.

That's the whole point behind the NOFRAMES tag.

At the w3schools, the top browser is Firefox at 36%. OK, OK it is a techie site not a general site. And yes, if you add IE5, IE6 and IE7 it comes to 57% beating Firefox. But still, for the first time, in Sep 2007, the column for Firefox becomes the king of the hill. Since IE6 is going down, till IE7 overtakes Firefox, it will keep the number 1 spot for sometime to come.

Microsoft had a spectacular first quarter.

Tremendous strength in Windows, Office, and Server products. Revenues in each division up 20%. Microsoft Q1 2008 By The Numbers

Office 2007 at retail "sells like gangbusters."

Office commands 17.4 percent of all PC software dollar volume, including PC games. When people go to the store to buy software, there's a good chance they'll end up buying Microsoft Office." PC Software's Great Year [October 20]

The October OS Platform Stats from w3Schools are suggestive;

Vista at 6%. Up 4% from March 07.
Linux at 3%. Up 1% from March 03.
OSX at 4%. Up 2% from March 03.

The w3Schools OS platform stats for October:

Vista 5.6%
OSX 3.9%
Linux 3.3%

OSX stands pretty much where it was in January.
Linux has shown slow erosion all year. If you want an accessible *NIX OS the Mac is right there in front of you.
Vista 0% in January, 4% in August, and likely 6% or better in November. Competing against Microsoft is like running against a freight train. Once the thing builds up momentum it becomes very hard to stop.

Fun fact for the day: Slashdot allows unordered lists that would totally prevent that problem. It will do nothing for your homophobic self-loathing, though.

IE 7 has solved a lot of that

IE7 does not "solve" anything. Its another platform that needs to be tested on. IE6 still has more market share than IE7 according to this:

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

a) If going to the restaurant were significantly cheaper in the US than in the EU, I would understand. Going to a restaurant that serves me the same quality of food I'm used to is going to cost me around 40€ per person. I've been to the US, and I couldn't stand anything below that price point. The waiter is going to spend a maximum of 15 minutes on me, and that's being generous! Bringing drinks, open bottle of wine, bring food, as how it's going, bring coffee. So, even if I tip them only 5€, that's a friggin 20€/hour! That's what I make as an IT specialist with 8 years experience back home! Go figure, but there is most certainly a reason that they are waiters and don't have a better job. So, they should just take their lives in their hands and go study something better.

b) Slashdot does allow the euro sign (€), and just like those waiters you just perhaps need a better education. The solution is HTML Entities.

c) I can't help it that you people have a braindead system for paying waiters in the first place...

Even assuming $1=1€, it's about double what I'd pay for a big diesel Uhaul type panel truck for the weekend.

I live in an extremely expensive country. Just for comparison: my rent is 1300€/month for a 80sq metre apartment (861 square feet according to google). I won't say, I swallow 250€ like that, but it's not the end of the world for something you planned (like moving, you don't do that on a whim) [Sidenote: to have a visible euro sign on slashdot, use html entities: € = €]

Do you mean a car that's 10% larger, or have 10% of the fleet be larger vehicles?

I was talking about the fleet...

As said, I don't disagree with anything you say... I just find "shopping" a very lame excuse for justifying a large car.

I don't think so

Because opera has maybe 3% at most of the market share. Firefox has 10X the market share, and IE has almost twice that.

This is why nobody brings up opera in these debates, because statistically their position is insignificant. If they grow their market share, then people will start to listen.

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp

They display over 4 years of trends by month, and from everything I've read, those numbers accurately mirror the internet/world as a whole for usage (the trends are identical for my company's website). If you take a look at the latest numbers, the amount of Apple users are actually decline statistically. An article I read this week from the AP says that the PC manufactures are now selling more PC's than anytime in the past two years. While the Apple decline is a .2% overall change, and only for a two month trend, when you only max out at 4% of users, it's fairly large number.

Also take a look at the numbers of Vista use has increased by nearly 20% in one month (all while minimally affecting XP usage). It appears that people are switching to Vista from Linux and OSX and not the otherway around. I'm beginning to tire of all this pro-apple BS/studies being pushed by Slashdot & Gizmodo, when the actual numbers don't add up.

The September OS stats from w3Schools are out and make interesting reading:

Vista 4.5% Up From O% in January 07 Up 0.5% since August 07
There has been a roughly 5% drop in XP and W2K combined since January 07.

OSX 3.8% Back to where it was in December 06

Linux 3.4% Up from 3% in May 04

Windows users upgrade within the Windows family, Mac users within the Mac family. Linux users stay where they are. News at eleven.

I've ranted about this before.

Not everyone will have these fonts; not for a long time, anyways. Browsers will then instead use the default sans serif font (Helvetica or Arial typically). Pages viewed in Arial or Helvetica that were intended for Calibri will, at least, not look good and, at worst, be completely unreadable.

Why?

Calibri (which is the one font in the group certain to become the choice of future web developers) has a different size than, say, Arial. A 1em or 12pt or 14px tall Calibri character is going to actually be smaller than the same sized Arial character. The reason is due to the design of the font and the font's leading.

A page set at 100% (default) font size that looks good in Calibri will look oversized in Arial or Helvetica. Furthermore any sort of soft-alignments between texts or text and other page elements will break. For example the content you expect to appear "above the fold" or appear shorter than an image you've got aligned to the right will now be pushed below the fold or below the height of the image, creating an page layout for someone using a stock browser.

Let's take a shot in the dark here. Now these fonts are installed as part of Office 2007. They're part of Vista. They're not part of XP unless you either have Office 2007 or the 2007 compatibility pack installed. Let's say 5% of all internet browsing computers are Vista and 75% are XP. How many of those 75% have Office 2007 or the compatibility pack (which isn't automatically downloaded via windows update, requiring the user go and download it). I think a more than fair value is that 25% of those 75% have Office 2007 or the compatibility pack installed. That equals out to about 25% of all computer users have Calibri support right now. If you design with Calibri you're ignoring 75% of your user base.

In 3-5 years that number, I believe, will drastically increase to the point where the majority will support Calibri. But not now. So don't design with it.

A pair of H-tags mark the start and end of each heading element. If your document already has worthwhile text, you should put meaningful section names into properly nested heading elements. This will allow user agents, especially browsers for media types other than screen and robotic user agents operated by search engines, to discover and make use of the structure of your document. See Web Content Accessibility Guidelines: Structural Grouping to learn how to set up your clients the H-tag.

Incidentally, WCAG is probably one of the most effective SEO guides that I've ever read.

Also, there's this.

Nah. I can tell you... going through my server logs, I see Macs outpacing Linux by a large number. If you go to a larger, more heavy-traffic site like w3schools.com, you'll see that through 2005, Linux did lead Mac, but ever since the beginning of 2006, the fortunes of Mac have been rising while the fortunes of Linux have been pared back.

With the introduction of the Intel-based Macs, the "Apples to Oranges" comparisons diminished and on a price to performance comparison with similarly equipped Windows machines, Macs became competitive. They're still considered pricy because you can't get a bargain Mac laptop running a Celeron chip with PC 2700 DDR system RAM.

So, yes, some places have been installing Linux on older commodity hardware, but the number of people switching from Windows to Mac is outpacing the number switching from Windows to Linux while the number of people switching from Linux to Mac is outpacing the people switching from Mac to Linux.

The switch to Intel was the best thing Apple did. Windows and Linux people now own Macs, doing much of their browsing and e-mail on their Macs, and running Windows or Linux in virtualized windows at speeds close to or exceeding the older hardware they upgraded from... on the rare occasion they need an app from one of those OSes they can't run on their Mac directly.

In the home market, migration is to the next generation of Windows hardware and software.

The OEM system bundle.

The DX10 system with mid-line performance and pricing is still quite new, probably shipping in significant numbers no earlier June. Not the prime shopping season for a PC.

That said, in the W3Schools stats, Vista went from 0 to 4% of the market in about six months.

In a statistical dead heat with Linux and OSX. OS Platform Stats - both of which, in PC terms, have been around since the last Ice Age.

But the parent doesn't really say that - much less prove it - all it says is that: "just the same, they probably saved millions of dollars using a free kernel."

This is what the boss sees when he looks at Windows Automotive:

Based on WinCE 5.0.

Comes with a full set of familiar - though significantly customized - development tools, APIs and so on.

DirectSound. Direct3D Mobile.

"The Automotive User Interface Toolkit (AUITK) - a GUI framework that makes it easy to create advanced user interfaces at a desktop PC and store them as XML markup.

This separates the user interface from the functional part of the application program." The UI designer does not have to be a programmer.

What does all this tell him about development costs, schedules and staffing?

It's about good citizenship, not an extra two cents profit per device.

That two cents can mean the difference between a stillborn project and product on the shelves at Target.

it really is true that linux users probably affect more sales than just the machines we buy for ourselves. I know I have personally influenced the buying habits 5 other users in the last 24 months (all non-linux users)

Twice nothing is still nothing.

Windows is approaching one billion users on the Desktop. Windows Vista has about the same market share as OSX and Linux - and got there in six months. OS Statistics

(no keys for Pound symbol on my keyboard, another symbol of yankee supremacy)

HTML entities are good for you...

In the W3Schools stats, Vista at about 4% is in a statistical dead heat with OSX and Linux. But Vista got there in about six months.

It is discouraging that talk about Id inevitably centers on talk about the latest tech demo from Carmack, Direct X vs OGL, Linux support and so on. It has been a long time since an Id game generated any such excitement.

This milestone needs to be correlated to of data such as
w3schools trends in browser usage. The users accessing w3schools are more usually folk with an IT bent, but the trend is visible.

Yep, right now it stands at a whole 3% of the market (the same as linux). I expect messing around with people's machines is going to increase it's popularity with a) "try before I buy" types and b) word of mouth from people too ignorant to realize what's happening and thinking that the OS is unstable (after all, OSes are supposed to 'blue screen' once in a while, RIGHT?).

I had a look a another page on this website out of curiosity. I was tickled to note that despite the fact that linux usage has remained fairly steady at 3.odd percent, Windows Vista - for all the hype and OEM bundles, has exactly the same usage as linux so long after its release.

      Oh wait, I hear the sound of Microsoft shills and Vista apologists headed this way...

      Vista's retail "great success" is almost, but not quite, the same magnitude as W's "Mission Accomplished"...

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

If you look at those usage statistics, Firefox is only a fragment below IE6, and quite a bit above IE7. Of course, I have no way of knowing how accurate these are, but I tend to trust W3 content.

So, when they say that IE "still" has over 60% of the "market share", why does that matter? Usage statistics are the only ones any web developer should care about, I have IE installed, because it came with Windows, so I'm assuming that my IE is part of those market share statistics, but I do all my browsing with Firefox, so as far as I can see, this is useless information. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Technologies like Flash and AJAX and all the other technologies surrounding and supporting them can add a great deal of value to a website, but only if done correctly.

Yeah, but I remember this excitement last year... and the year before that. In the last few years, I've seen tremendous improvements in the ease-of-use of Linux, and yet there has been no corresponding increase in the number of users:

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp

The number of Linux users has been roughly flat for the last three years. To me, Linux is ready for the desktop, and has been for quite some time. However, the simple truth is that most people buy a computer to run software, the vast majority of which is for Windows. Sure, Linux comes with a TON of its own stuff, which makes it useful to many, many people.

But even more people want to run commercial software that is Windows-only. Like games. Or business apps. Or the CD that came with their camera. Face it; if Wine worked with 100% reliability, Windows would be dead.

You can rant and rave about improvements in reliability, security, efficiency, GUI elements, and so forth, but at the end of the day what people care most about is: "Will it run my software?".

Also surprised about Firefox's 34.5%, compared to 20.1% for IE7 and 36.9% for IE6.
If it were not for the split between IE7 and IE6, which totals 57% between them, it would look like Firefox is doing really well.
So, Firefox is 34.5% compared to 57% for the later versions of IE.
Most of those Firefox installations are probably on Windows boxes, with IE available also.
Linux users most likely use Firefox, but since their overall numbers are so low compared to the Windows installations, they don't add a lot to the Firefox total of 34.5%.
The 1% of the OS totals for Windows 98 indicates to me that a lot of those boxes are still in use, but are dropping fast. Probably can't get on the internet anymore where they can be tracked. These boxes might be used as word processors, or game boxes, and not have to get on the internet, where 98's not safe anymore. There was a huge number of 98' machines at one time. They took Windows 95 off the list when it dropped below 0.1%.

I understand you're talking about round numbers, but Linux went from 2.6% to 3.4% since Nov 2003 and Mac went from 2.8% to 4% since Jan 2005. True, they are very small increases, however a good web developer cannot simply ignore 7.4% of their market. And I think the statistics you're quoting are not very relevant, because the browser dictates how the computer interacts with a site, not the OS.

On the same site I found these statistics: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.a sp

The browser market is FAR more fragmented than the OS one, with every IE version and FF pretty much tied.

In round numbers, this is how the world looks to the web developer:

Win XP 75%
Unchanged since September 06

W2K 6%
Down 5% since September 06.
W2K had little mass market exposure.

Vista 4%
Up from 0% in January 07
It should be interesting to see how Vista fares in Back-To-School and Christmas sales. You will be much less of the warmed-over XP box and much more of the DX10 system realistically spec'd for Vista. To speak of Vista's "failure" in the marketplace is desperately premature, if not inane.

OSX 4%
Unchanged since January 05

Linux 3%
Unchanged since November 03
However, the w3Schools stats suggest that Linux may be losing ground to the Mac and OSX.

W98 1%
Unchanged since August 06 OS Platform Statistics

this month, IE users were 58%, firefox was 35% and safari and opera barely registered.

How is 35% small? It seems pretty big to me.

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.a sp

Precisely.

The real world in which Microsoft saw a record $51 billion in revenues in its last fiscal year.

The real world in which the Windows OS is approaching one billion users on the desktop. 90% of the 124 million PCs in China. Where pirated Windows outsells Linux on the streets.

The real world in which public support for the anti-trust break-up of Microsoft never approached critical mass.

The real world in which Vista [which had zero visibility in January] runs head-to-head with Linux in OS Platform Statistics.

How do you use CSS without HTML?

Yeah the w3schools stat of 34% firefox is higher than the global average. The Wikipedia page on browser share summarizes statistics from a wide variety of sources (and includes links, of course). As can be seen, the values vary depending the location and types of sites used in the stats. According to some reports, Firefox is nearing 28% usage across Europe. The global stats for generic sites seem to agree that Firefox usage is 12%-15%, versus Internet Explorer (all versions) being 75%-84%.

Still, this is a huge shift from the 96% share IE had a few years back. The fact that some sites get 30% Firefox usage (actually I run a small site that gets 46% Firefox) means that web developers can no longer ignore coding to standards. This is a good thing.

The http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp site paints a much different picture with Vista sales not growing very fast at all and OS X and Linux still beating Vista sales.

1

Vista entered the [consumer] market January 31st.
You were expecting an 11% share in less than six months?

To put this in perspective:

Vista 3.0% in June Up From 0.0% in January 2007
Linux 3.4% in June Up From 2.7% in January 2004 OS Platform Stats

2

The Vista system sold in January was a warmed-over XP box. Not a "new" PC at all.

"Destined-For Vista" systems like HP's Vista Premium TouchSmart PC and the Vista Ultimate DX10 Pavilion Laptop with HD-DVD and 340 GB HDD began reaching the market only late this spring.

3

Vista missed the prime Back-to-School and Christmas shopping seasons in 2006. This year OEM Vista will be on the shelves with Windows Home Server which went gold {RTM] about a week or so back.

Over the past several years in IT I have personally seen many new adoptions of linux and mac, and the "phasing out" of windows servers and workstations, in business and in home use, I believe my experiences to be a decent industry cross-section, enough to gauge the overall direction of the market.

If you want statistics that are on par with the article, take a look at these:
http://www.google.com/trends?q=windows+xp%2C+ubunt u
From this graph you can easily see that Ubuntu will pass Windows in Google searches by 2008.
http://www.google.com/trends?q=windows+xp%2C+mac
And in this graph Mac OS X has already passed Windows!

Now this is just skewed data on par with the Vista vs Mac OS statistics in the article. If you were to compare Red Hat to Vista, for instance, queries involving Red Hat show an obvious decline, while there was a sharp spike in Vista queries the day of it's release. Not news either. And thats the point.

Here are some "unbiased" statistics. Note that the w3schools site says the stats are unreliable, much like the ones mentioned in this article.
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid= 2&qpmr=15&qpdt=1&qpct=3&qptimeframe=M&qpsp=96
http://www.swivel.com/data_sets/spreadsheet/100047 6

I have observed in my personal experience that non-Windows OSes are very slowly gaining ground, and Vista seems to be encouraging that trend, at least for now.

And I was under the impression it was at 7%. See? I can make up statistics too.

I apologize for not giving references. Since we're talking desktops, and since most desktops are used for browsing (among other things), here are a couple sources that will help give some ballpark estimations of Linux penetration on the desktop.

W3 schools, a developer site shows 3.4% of their traffic comes from Linux machines. Since this is a site aimed at developers, this is probably higher than the actual desktop percentage. See http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp if you're interested.

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid= 5 doesn't have a column for Linux, but the "other os" column shows 3.54%. It aggregates stats from thousands of websites, so is probably more representative of the typical desktop than W3 schools and can probably be safely used as an upper limit.

I'd love to see stats from other sources if anyone cares to post links to them.

Fun with numbers: W3Schools shows Vista with a 3.0% share in June. Up from 0% in January 2007. Linux at 3.4%. Up 0.4% from January 2004. OS Platform Statistics

It is worth taking a look at W3Schools Display Statistics

While surfing the content-rich web - the media-rich web - in 2007 is fundamentally a middle-class experience, the demands of the browser are trivial even at entry level - and have been for years:

Compaq Desktop PC w/ Intel Pentium 4 Processor

Vista Basic
3.2 GHz P4
512 MB RAM 160 GB SATA HDD.
DVD Burner
Intel integrated graphics (Pathetic, but upgradeable)
$328

Fun with numbers: W3Schools shows Vista with a 3.0% share in June. Up from 0% in January 2007. Linux at 3.4%. Up 0.4% from January 2004. OS Platform Statistics

It is worth taking a look at W3Schools Display Statistics

While surfing the content-rich web - the media-rich web - in 2007 is fundamentally a middle-class experience, the demands of the browser are trivial even at entry level - and have been for years:

Compaq Desktop PC w/ Intel Pentium 4 Processor

Vista Basic
3.2 GHz P4
512 MB RAM 160 GB SATA HDD.
DVD Burner
Intel integrated graphics (Pathetic, but upgradeable)
$328

XP sales will thrive until businesses switch over, which will take some time. And the more saavy businesses will wait for service pack one before switching. This is not surprising - we saw a similar phenomena back when XP came out. Here is an article from as recent as 2005 talking about the slow switchover from 98/2000 to XP http://www.betanews.com/article/Windows_XP_Adoptio n_Rates_Slow/1118943913

The 8% I made up for my example was generous. It's most likely smaller than that.

If you want an idea of what percentage of machines on the net that are Macs, web stats are a very good indicator....

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid= 2

Obviously this is Microsoft's doing. It couldn't possibly be that the ISP in question are run by idiots, are willing to save any money any way they can by only supporting the most popular browser in their ignorance and greed.

M$ does pressure ISPs to do dumb things. If you think M$ does not have the ability to harm Comcast with an "update", you are sadly deluded. Cox people have told me that M$, AOL and other lean on them to block ports and do other dumb things.

Now why is insisting on IE 5.5 insanely stupid? Let's count the ways:

• Minority market share.As low as 1.5% Firefox is as good as any single browser now.
• It's easier and quicker and more reliable to tech the techs standards and have a small number of scripts than it to read one long wrong one. On the phone, time is money. The script for gnu/linux would take less than two minutes.
• The result of getting it wrong is a service that does not work. IE 5.5 only is ISP suicide.

Doing what M$ tells you is like drinking Jim Jone's cool aid. It's not in your best interest and you won't be going to heaven.

That depends on where you look.

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp