How-To On Ajax Code To Show Movies and Slide Shows

An anonymous reader writes "Sites like Flikr and YouTube show just the tip of the full potential for media on the Web. An IBM DeveloperWorks article provides some easy implementations of video and image browsing that you can use in your own project. Learn how to combine media with technologies such as PHP and Ajax to create a compelling experience. All Sample code is made available, and if you're into Mashups the site's Mashup resource space should have everything you need to create a Mashup of your own."

Comments

Great, more Ajax

[The_Mystic_For_Real]

I suppose the 12 year olds creating Geocities pages have grown up and want to incorporate all the extravagant flash into their more grown up web pages.
We really need to get back to simple, clean cut pages that display the information and resources that your site is offering. The trend towards flashier
page is rapidly decreasing the utility of the web while increasing overhead and security issues. Simple can be beautiful, and it is almost always useful.

Re:Great, more Ajax

[whiskey6]

See, this is where I disagree with you. What we don't need more of are these clean, simple sites that you long for. Clean cut is great, but clean a shave is far better, as demonstrated on this flickr page: http://www.flickr.com/photos/14815126@N03/show/ (NSFW) What's not to like?

Re:Great, more Ajax

[Bonewalker]

It is my understanding that Ajax is really about bringing new/fresh data based on things like user-input without having to reload the page, thus making the web experience much faster and more user-friendly. So, it would seem to me that it doesn't necessarily mean the page(s) or site(s) can't be simple and useful regardless of whether or not they incorporate Ajax. Am I wrong on this analysis?

Re:Great, more Ajax

[chris_7d0h]

Asynchronous Javascript and XML (or in practice XmlHttpRequests using any kind of text based wire format) are a nice addition and if used as pure decorators on top of sites driven by server side markup generation, then it is a good thing. The issue I and others have is that what "Ajax" seems to also imply when applied by sites in practice is a heavy reliance on a lot of client side DOM manipulations.

A site designed around the notion that as long as "Firefox and IE" can morph the bootstrap HTML page through an infinite number of morphs to something completely different, then the site is good. Those kinds of sites are neigh impossible to use via Wget, perl, lynx or any client not having:

1) A Javascript engine
2) A DOM engine
3) a special variant of A and B combined in such a way that they replicate the same quirks (attributes and behavior) inherent in IE and Mozilla.

So to sum it up, I don't think anyone has anything negative to say about requesting data fragments as an alternative to doing full posts/gets to the server. It's when people are being forced to one of a select few specific applications in order to use the web that irritation starts surfacing.

Damn.

[jd]

If everyone gets a full house on their Buzzword Bingo cards from the summary alone, we're going to have to divide up the prize again. Now to cut the coffee cake into 100,000 equal slices. Don't cut your fingers on the crumbs...

Re:Putting things in prospective

[merreborn]

Ajax is one single function: XMLHttpRequest, a extension to the browser DOM invented by MS. In other words its a propierty hack on the browser API, nothing more.

"proprietary hack"? Not for long:

http://www.w3.org/TR/XMLHttpRequest/