Slashdot Mirror
Ajax and the Ken Burns Effect
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.'"
"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."
Funnypics
It's Exxxcellent.
can'tcountuptofour
And why did this article fall into the PC vs MAC thing for you??? I don't see as that and I AM a Mac user after 22+ years of PC's. They are both valid platforms.
The use of AJAX technique in that example is spurious, at best. It's almost sad, really, since that's probably the only reason this article was accepted.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
Yes, AJAX is great. Of course, the XML bit of it gets in the way, it's simpler to just grab the appropriate HTML or Javascript code directly from the server. Why write something that outputs in XML, then write client-side Javascript to re-interpret it and run javascript code or create HTML? XML is just a complication for most tasks.
Speak before you think
A person who thinks that they are a Mac user but are really just trying to be. The mistake they make is to try to become a Mac user, when real Mac users are all about not trying to be anything and following your own rules. There is no fashion code to being a Mac user. There are no rules as to what applications you have to run.
Recent converts like you are ruining the old school Mac community because you are posers. Apple releases one OS that popularizes Fitts' law and the Genie effect, and suddenly people assume being a Mac user is all about owning a Mac. But a real Mac user is born, not made. You "switchers" are misrepresenting yourselves and the Mac platform. You're giving people the wrong idea of what Macintosh is.
switcher: shops at hot topic, thinks Firefox is a good Mac app, waiting for OS X port of PayrollPro 2000, follows any hint of a fashion trend (instead of setting them!), wouldn't know Clarus from Carl Sagan.
real Mac user: someone true to who they are, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules and they have no respect for the status quo. The ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world.
I still definitely refrain from Ajax like hell. The concept of delivering the load to client's computer whereas being subject to limitations of the visitor pc, and the risk of not being able to deliver the content as wanted or even at all, is one too big to take. Processing everything server side, and printing out just plain old HTML formatted result to a client pc, thus bypassing all overzealous anti-virus, privacy, anti-spyware and security software and any limitation the client pc has, is the surest thing to do, dont you think ?
Read radical news here
It's annoying when suddenly a deal breaker is "I don't like the flicker when I click the button".
This is the worst copy-and-paste troll yet. Mac users, rebels indeed.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
Where are the sepia tones, jazz soundtrack, and pedantic voiceover?
Tom
Innovation makes enemies of all those who prospered under the old regime... -- Machiavelli
A guy walks up to me and asks, "What's Macintosh?" I show him my Quadra 840av and say "That's Macintosh." So he runs out, he buys a shiny new Mac mini, and he comes back and says "That's Macintosh?" and I say "No, that's trendy!"
Your anus runs Linux?
Now I've heard everything.
If the Web 2.0 revolution has one buzzword, it's... err, these three buzzwords, Asynchronous JavaScript and XML... hmmm, ok, scrap that.
When I read "Burns" I thought some guy in that "The Simpsons" show...
Why are you biting on an obvious copy and paste troll?
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Ken Burns effect? What, it takes 10 hours to get through the thing?
...Web 2.0 is a buzzword itself. I've seen an article that showed that many of the "Web 2.0" technologies are largely older technologies that have been renamed and rehyped, this time around, they took hold.
This is poor advice. First you GET. Did you even look at the article?
Alan
This looks like an interesting technique, but I think that you would have to have a very good reason to use this feature in a real presentation, otherwise it might come across as distracting. The presenter should be trying to make some sort of point (or sale, or argument, or...). I'm sure that there are some cases where this could really make a big different to a presentation, but I'd guess that these are fairly rare.
On the subject of web enabled presentation formats, I really like S5, Eric Meyer's Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System (see http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/ ). This is much more simple than the technique from the article, and there are now some very powerful Scriptalicious extenstions that can add dynamic features to S5. One of my own presentations is at http://www.exubero.com/ant/antintro-s5.html
My business: Farstrider Studios.
Maybe it would help if they hired Ricardo Montalbán to say the title on account of his Star Trek background, and perhaps Fantasy Island?
HAS a Buzzword? Web 2.0 IS the buzzword!
If the Web 2.0 revolution has one buzzword, it's Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Ajax)
Yeah... a buzzwords (Web 2.0 (which technically doesn't exist)) buzzwordbuzzword (AJAX)...
Man, I'm happy to have the great hobby called programming and not actually being forced to listen to such BS every day on work before I get outsourced.
I wonder if they use such buzzshit in India? If not, maybe that's what they're doing right!
Actually, Ken Burns has a wealth of material to work with, but none of it moves. He scowers the public records, historical accounts, and personal diaries to find these very insightful, personal accounts that really bring to life a time before universal capture of moving images. He scans and pans over static images to create a backdrop for what is essentially a book on tape. He does an excellent job considering the lack of movies and video, but not for lack of material.
I've used Ajax a bit to develop an enterprise application and it just tends to turn into one big mess (perhaps by my own fault but nevertheless ;) ). Is there a completely object-oriented Ajax library out there because this would significantly improve the usability of ajax.
There should be a "-1:Groupthink"
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.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Linux passes through my anus when I have the runs.
First, I will say this is a pretty slick piece of work. But the actual rendering (download the example and give it a shot) is nowhere near as smooth as what can be accomplished with an iPhoto slideshow, or with Flash.
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.
#DeleteChrome
Now here's a good Flash animation. Try doing that with "Web 2.0".
The article must be all true, since it uses engineering spelling [from the article]: "Jack Herrington..., Senior Software Enginee, Code Generation Network"
This is why Gmail has an alternative to the Ajax interface , and you can switck to HTML mode , and it just removes the AJAX dependant features :e r=15049)
* 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
My Starcraft 2 Blog
when flash really did have to be downloaded (all 250k of it)
now it comes as standard on Windows (since 1999)
still its good to see IBM are catching up, maybe they will discover WebTV and WAP next
Ha. Thanks for a good laugh.
it's tough to show you what this looks like in a browser, when i'm plainly viewing it... WITH A BROWSER?
wtf?
This comment is fully compliant with RFC 527.
Macs have always been trendy. It's just that what was trendy 20 years ago isn't what is trendy now--that's why it's called trendy. Want to be rebellious? Come over to the Linux side.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
I deeply resent sites that take too long to load because of all the gratuitous glitz. How about forgetting the stupid animation all together and just give me what I'm actually looking for.
... who was it again? How much money are they making these days? Hmm.
It seems to me that one of the web search engines won't let ads with graphics on their site. Lets see
If you actually need to show me a picture don't bother getting cute. If I want to watch animations I'll go looking for them.
Take my advice and you'll save lots of bandwidth and cpu cycles for both of us.
"The new model is more asynchronous, as shown in Figure 2."
You heard it here first: 'Web 2.0' "more asynchronous" than the Web.
Just for the record, in case the author fancies stopping his buzzword posturing:
"asynchronous
adj 1: (digital communication) pertaining to a transmission
technique that does not require a common clock between
the communicating devices; timing signals are derived
from special characters in the data stream itself
[ant: synchronous]
2: not synchronous; not occurring or existing at the same time
or having the same period or phase [ant: synchronous]"
Anyone notice they have MAC screen shots on this IBM web site? What is this world coming to?
Intelligent Design
In practice, AJAX means Asynchronous JavaScript And XMLHttpRequest. Nothing in the XMLHttpRequest object's interface requires that the retrieved data be XML; it could be in other notations such as CSV or JSON.
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 article is a horrible example of it. It saves you nothing here - he could have just had the image list inline in the page and the user would see no difference.
The whole rest of the article is just DHTML, of which you could get much better examples at Dynamic Drive or any of another dozen sites.
O RLY?
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 slide show that contains synchronized narration, how do I provide it using AJAX?
I don't get it, why do they fully detail a web cool app without a live demo??
Are there any examples of this in action?
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
The Ken Burns effect was a term coined by Steve jobs with iphoto was launched. The Pan and Scan effect as it is properly called has well been around long before Ken used it. We just associate it with him because most of his Documentaries are about subjects that had only or mostly still images to use in the show. I am Highly amussed now that a Purly Steveism is not a main stream term. If you can show me a use of Ken Burns Effect prior to iPhoto please link me up.
OMG Ponies!!! with Glitter!!!! I miss Pink
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, unless you can make a case that millions of users of millions of Windows machines should install Cygwin, X11, and KDE to get Konqueror.
No it isn't. It's two words.
Common definitions of "buzzword" include phrases. Your pedantry fails it ;-)
They're onto something here, but they botch a very important step: what they do with the XML once it's returned. Instead of generating the HTML through Javascript as they do, it makes much more sense to use XML transformations.
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.
I can tell some stuff about you.
-your film didn't get into Sundance. Or Cannes. Or ResFest. Or the fucking Two Boots weekend Short Series. The tough part about it is that your film probably isn't that bad. It's probably very smart, except for the disdain you have for the very audience that has to judge your film, and view your film, and LIKE YOUR FILM. Your problem now is the problem you've always had. You don't just need to be different, you NEED EVERYONE TO KNOW YOUR ARE. And that's why you're a luser.
-you got beat up in high school. You lost your virginity to a hooker, and you came quickly, trying to please her sexually. Oh yeah, and you ate her pussy.
-you do some really progressive music that cycles on long timelines like every hour or so. It's probably really cool if I had a 300 year lifespan and thus a different sense of time perspective, but I don't - so that makes it lame. And again, that makes you lame, because your "genius" exists in a vacuum, completely distinct from reality for the majority of people other than you.
-you're not as smart or ingenius as you think you are.
-Smart Windows users treat computers as the things they are: imminently replaceable commoditized items. It's a tool. Windows users are not tool fuckers. Idiots pay double the price for REDUCED FUNCTIONALITY. Yessir, that means you. I can make movies, music, code, etc, on windows machines - and I can run a small cluster at the cost of one powerbook. And I don't have to dick around with Linsux for hours to get shit done. Nor do I pay Jobs a ridiculous tax just so I can suck his dong. Your 4+ grand can get me 4 notebooks and peripherals - and some cash left over to buy your girlfriend drinks at the bar while you lament your artistic struggles. LOL
Tough break, buddy. Your girlfriend is kinda hot though... and the things she does after a couple of drinks. LOL
Everyone Hates Javascript, no one here would ever admit to allowing javascript run on their browsers due to the infinite number of security problems it creates ... or so says nearly everyone who has posted on this website in the last few years.
... rename it as AJAX ... suddenly its all good.
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.
George Bush + Linux = "I will not let information get in the way of the fight against Windows"
Java always slows things way down, so whenever i get to a site that does have java, i get out and look for an equivalent bit of information at some other site, or if it is a merchant, i don't buy that item.
I thought the "Ken Burns Effect" is the effect that popular US history documentaries have on US national archives. Like the Smithsonian giving Viacom's Showtime cable station a monopoly on access to the archives. Kinda like burning the public archives, without burning the money it makes a private corporation.
--
make install -not war
Four buzzwords and a float if you count "Web 2.0" Five if you count "revolution". Let's not count "revolution".
However, now that AJAX is "Ajax" losing its acronym status, that's still five buzzwords.
Then there's XML, which is really "eXtensible Markup Language", totalling 8 buzzwords.
Then there's JavaScript, which is just one implementation of ECMAScript, the other most common one being JScript (10 buzzwords.)
In conclusion, if the Web 2.0 revolution has any buzzwords, these are them:
- Web
- 2.0
- Ajax
- Asynchronous
- JavaScript
- And
- XML
- eXtensible
- Markup
- Language
- World
- Wide
- Consortium
- Standards
- Driven
- Rich
- Internet
- Application
- XHTML
- CSS
- Content
- Scrambling... no wait... I mean...
- Cascading
- Style
- Sheet
- RSS
- Really
- Simple
- Syndication
- SVG
- Scalable
- Vector
- Graphics
- XUL
- User
- Interface
- Language
- Google
- Maps
JavaScript isn't OO enough for you?
Ken Burns didn't.
does Web 2.0 have to do with Ajax?
Ajax is nothing special. It's a structured (HTML) document, and it's Javascript to dynamically reload or change parts of it. It's basically an extension to good old Dynamic HTML.
Web 2.0 is about wishy-washy stuff like the Semantic Web and intelligent agents etc., all things that aren't really technological, but rather castles in the sky. Ajax is the simple application of down-to-earth technology to take static web pages a step further.
Hmmmm...lack of material? I guess you never saw The Civil War: A Film by Ken Burns. It's 11 hours of documentary. In fact, it's one of the longest documentaries I can recall since Victory at Sea. He's got so much stuff packed in to this ball of wax that the average TV viewer won't hold still for all of it nor digest the majority of it. I don't recall much fat to his narrative and at times, the pace of his following the thread of two sides interacting through complex battle scenarious leaves many viewers dazed. I found it exhilarating, but at times I think he could have in places used a bit more of the "Ken Burns Effect", lingered a tad longer on a few key photos and slowed down the storytelling to let us viewers catch our breaths and let the details sink in.
...of the Ken Burns Effect?
This is the animated equivalent of chartjunk. It does not improve a bar chart to make the bars look like Cuisinaire rods instead of rectangles. It does not improve a slide show to move and zoom the pictures in random directions.
This is a silly demonstration of technology for technology's sake.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
>Processing everything server side, and printing out just plain old HTML formatted result to a client pc, thus bypassing all overzealous anti-virus, privacy, anti-spyware and security software and any limitation the client pc has, is the surest thing to do, dont you think ?
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 just about manage serving up html and javascript. Pushing the processing down to the client PC is idea; I only have 1MB storage for code + filesystem on a 25MHz CPU. House rules dictate I may not use java, so ajax seems ideal.
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
Folks, if you couldn't figure this crap out before they labeled it AJAX, do us all a favor and give up your career as a developer. JavaScript is a scripting language, its not rocket science. Its not even C++. This sort of thing is why real software engineers laugh at IT departments and Web Developers- they make a big deal of something very routine. XML is another great example of this- ooooohhh a data file that uses hierachial tags to represent structure data...how revolutionary, and how wasteful of space and bandwidth.
If the concept of asynchronous retrieval of XML and transforming it into something useful bends your mind so much that you need an article like this one to make it simple for you, then you are a liability to your profession and your company is better off without you.
Please, enough of the AJAX buzzword. Its Javascript, plain and simple, with a browser object to facilitate the retrieval of data. All of these 'technologies' have been around for years and I'm amazed that everyone thinks its something new.
You guys who find this article interesting are going to crap your pants if you look at something like Wild Tangent's DOM object plugin.
Why do you lump yourself into that grouping? You assume that because you use a Mac, that you have something in common with them other than the fact that you use Macs. Wrong. They have genius. You have: "I fell for Jobs marketing scheme and I go hard for baby boomers in black turlenecks!"
Such a poorly constructed argument and blatant appeal to emotion confirm it. You aren't that bright. Good luck with everything though.
Tough break buddy.
Why do we lump ourselves into that grouping? Because we've always shared something in common. We were aesthetes before we were friends, and we were friends before we were Mac users. And we will always stick together. Bon soir.
Bon soir.
Lol. And on top of all those deficiencies, you're gay????? Lol. You should just play russian roulette with a full gun.
where do i see a demo to see whether something like this is even worth implementing? i looked all over the page :(. this is something i may want to take a stab at, but no clue what end product is.
Martini Glasses
Periodically web becomes accessible by new medium, like the WAP and upcoming new tech. Even if we were able to pass the new fancy standards to desktop and laptop pcs on the web, the new mediums will need more time until they become powerful to take on these fancy stuff easily. Which, if you think, is much visitors lost - and that is much lost potential for expansion of the web that would have been realized quicker. As it stands now the new gadgetry can keep up what we already have on the web, but if we juice our sites up, this might change. Still, it might be wiser to refrain from pumping up the sites yet.
Read radical news here
Interesting idea for an article, but the writing scares me...
Quote from the article:
From a career perspective, the "back-end engineers" of the Web V1.0 world, who focused just on the database and the business logic, are limited in the Web V2.0 world. It's time to realize that not all requests to the server are going to be looking for HTML. Also, Ajax and DHTML are real tools for real engineers who are paid real money for their skills. The front end isn't just for designers.
Uhm, so backend developers don't care if their code and data are used to generate xml, javascript, or to power a think client. Also, show me a "softare enginee" that thinks "that all requests to the server are going to be looking for HTML." and i will show you a newbie PHP developer.
the Acid2 test doesn't test for compliance of CSS standards.
True, perfect rendering of Acid2 is necessary but not sufficient for perfect handling of CSS2. However, IE's continuing poor performance on Acid2, even in IE 7 pre-release builds, indicates Microsoft's attitude toward conforming to established open standards for the Web.
can't wait to see Monty's version!
...is what happens with al the people who actually need static content to particpate in this supposedly improved New Web Order.
.com (they want it all ASP.NET 2.0-ified) for a fairly large corp and 508 compliance is a pretty big deal...and truthfully it should be. We talk about wheelchair ramps and other physical accomodations, and even computer accessibility, but AJAX is circumventing our current accessibility model.
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 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/
-Tom
Interesting that the atricle uses PHP with the AJAX-enabled slideshow.
Now I'm wondering how do the platforms out there stack up to creating theses kind of apps (PHP, RoR, .NET, Java, etc.)
Need a color? Try 100 random colors
Your so full of crap troll... If it weren't for us SWITCHERS, Apple would have dried up LONG ago. Go sit on it and spin..
If you're replying to your own post, your career as a troll is either just beginning or just about to end.
And though you got a few slashbots into a lather, it has to feel hollow given the modus operandi. Keep trying.
I figure this OpenGL screensaver, iSlideshow , might be of interest given the topic. It allows you to select a set of images and play them back ken burn's style.
This is a troll? It's a joke, you morons. The "Ken Burns Effect" became famous when Ken Burns directed The Civil War for PBS. To think that I used to come to slashdot for the intellectual stimulation. It's like most of the smart people have left. Yeah, the curve has moved so much that I'm one of the smart ones now. Freakin' idiots.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
You can smash 'em with a baseball bat...
;-)
or post a link to it on ShashDot
And I thought REAL Mac-users were the ones who were not educated enough to grasp a concept of more-than-one-button-on-a-mouse. Silly me.
Mac is yet another computing platform. Accept it (or die).
With XML, you have a standarized generic output that could be parsed by any number of clients. Thus, the AJAX/javascript browers-based client is just one of many ways to access and display the data. You could also be serving the data to a java Swing app or a MS VB app, and the server wouldn't care. By using XML, you keep everything portable and generic.
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 using XML because you only expect one type of client, which you yourself will code anyway. If you are providing a web-service to serve up weather data that other people can integrate into an application, or (an even better example) grabbing third party generated weather data, you will appreciate having the data in XML because of its portablility and especially its structured organization.
As an example, I am working on a way to grab the text of some government regulations and integrate them into a web application that will reference the appropriate regulation based upon some simple questions that the user will answer. The morons that host the reg are serving up valid but sloppy and fairly unorganzied HTML. So, if I want to zero in on, say, Part 3, subpart 301, paragraph(b)(3), I have to code a very specific parser to search and find what I want. But if they had everything in XML, I would just zero in on the named element tag that I want.
...that the PC demographic is closely aligned with NASCAR-watching trailer trash. Shouldn't you be at an evangelical revival right now? Or at a dentist's?
These guys also intrested to implement in in their sets. my Ajax based feed reader to view content of other sites.Use it and enjoy!
Anyone else run this code? My CPU darts to 100% usage on my 1.5Mhz AMD. I love JavaScript, but this obviously is not a good use for it.
Didn't you had to finnish saying "Jobs akbar" and burning a PC in the street?
I call bullshit on SmallFurryCreature's comment.
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 functional modern reproductions of vintage Crosley "record players."
Polaroid film and LP players are not hard to find. And they are real physical objects that need to be manufactured.
But SmallFurryCreature is too lazy to put in a few lines of code to ensure that customers with older PCs can access a website? I assure you that people with screen resolutions set at 800x600 or 640x480 are quite common in "the real world."
When people with those displays can't access SmallFurryCreature's website, they are NOT going to jump up and go to CompUSA and buy a new PC. No, what they'll do is, they'll go to some other company's website. There are plenty of them on the Web that work on low-resolution screens.
Maybe SmallFurryCreature works for a company that thinks losing, say, 1% of their customer base to the competition is no big deal. Good luck to him and his company: they're going to need it.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Your comparison is like apples and oranges. The reason AJAX is good for Google Maps is because it allows you to interact with the map in real time. There is no need to interact with a slideshow in real time, other than to pause / rewind/ fast-forward it, none of which would involve trips to the server anyways.
Stupid use of AJAX.
do you think there's some sort of connection between perl sigs and a preference for literacy over flashy effects, namely preferring book reading to slide shows?
next new trend: WEB -1.0.??
It turns out flash sucks.
What? A buzzword that has one buzzword!?!?!? How amusing!
I'd known this would happen sooner or later, and it did.
...
I am going to devise a tournament system in Ajax for a client of one of my contractors.
I do not get why the client is too enthusiastic about this new 'collection of scripting languages'. All in all, his site wont be getting any considerable number of users at a given time for justifying the delegation of the server load to client pcs', there is nothing s/he cannot have done with the server side applications, via PHP, MySQL etc, but the client is still very interested in having that way.
The fact that ActiveX is already used to plant rootkits in home pcs, the load, even if it is a small one, that happens while compiling ajax pages in the visitor pc and the way it occasionally leads to lock-ups in client pc because clients often have 5-6 windows and applications active at the same time, and the idea of scaling down and down the applet further to be fit into operation windows that might get smaller with the number of applications open in a client pc are stuff that can not be taken lightly
I admit that i wonder to undertake such a mid-sized project for testing out and getting accustomed to this new much-hyped technique however. Its good to know, even if you do oppose the disadvantages it brings.
But my belief still is that, in 1-1.5 years time, many system adminstrators, users, anti-virus, security and privacy programs will be barring or filtering out many functions that comes with the Ajax combination, or allow omly prominent sites like gmail to run in the client pc, due to security concerns. The fact that you can get procedures performed in the remote pc is already an open door to many malicious activity, and the 'black' crowd i guess wouldnt wait long to jump in to the new ride to spread a phletora of malicious stuff. So shortly, best way for many security software, and adminstrators would be to directly filter ajax content coming out from non-prominent sites, ie small sites, to make sure no harm is done on the clients' pc.
Taking into account the fact that the main advantage of ajax is the delegation of the server load to the client pc - which is something big guys sorely need, but almost maybe 80% of the sites on the internet does not -, and combining it with the possibility of being filtered/barred by the security software/adminstrators as not being a 'big guy', takes me into the conclusion that Ajax is a 'big boys'' tool.
Read radical news here