Developing with next-generation Dynamic HTML

Asynchronous JavaScript and XML combine to enable powerful new capabilities for browser-based UIs

Macromedia Flexes its muscles.

Macromedia’s server-side products have never quite enjoyed the same kind of success that it’s desktop applications have (the exception being Cold Fusion, but then it was already quite successful before it became a part of the Macromedia stable.)

So with the release of Macromedia Flex, is this equation going to change?

Not sure.

Firstly, there is a very similar product in Laszlo Presentation Server that has been around for a while. But despite its potential, I’m not sure if Laszlo has made quite the impact it was hoping to. Flex is definitely has a advantage in Brady (the MXML editor) but the real challenge for application developers would be to justify the cost of an additional application server just to render the UI which in turn requires a plugin on the client.

Somehow, I’m finding this a little difficult to justify. Had the same problem justifying Generator development about four years ago. But then that was the dot.com boom time, and funding an ambitious online application was slightly easier than it is now. So the question is, will Flex go the Generator way?

CSS Best Practices

Dave Shea at Mezzoblue has a post about CSS Best Practices and is inviting contributions:

“A CSS Best Practice is a one sentence action statement, a “thou shalt” or “thou shalt not” (paraphrased, of course) that highlights a specific issue, be it browser compatibility, code integrity, or whatever else can actually be considered factual (instead of opinion).”

This is followed by a paragraph that goes more in depth about why or why not someone would want to follow the action, with links to further reading. This is the stuff that, if you know it ahead of time, makes your design process much less of a headache.

Go over and make your contributions now. It'll make a very good resource.

Making the Absolute Relative

Doug Bowman at stopdesign.com has a very good artcle that looks at how one object positioned with CSS affects other positioned objects inside it...

The difference between sitemaps and site indexes...

Boxes and Arrows has an article about sitemaps, site indexes, what they are, and why you should use them...

There is a school of thought though, that believes that if a site needs a sitemap for navigating around it, there is something wrong with the navigation, and maybe the sitemap should be made the homepage...

Can the same logic be used for large sites?

Personally I do not provide a sitemap link anywhere on sites I design. But the 404 page (page not found error) itself can be a sitemap. So users see the sitemap only if they are not able to find what they are looking for, otherwise the navigation should take care of the rest...

You can check this implementation on the latest Digité site...

HTML Select Elements you can type into

For some reason, IE for Windows has been missing the handy feature that allows web form fillers to type in select element choices. In this bonus recipe you won't find in his JavaScript & DHTML Cookbook, author Danny Goodman provides a solution and example code to fill the gap, giving your form fillers a more uniform experience across browsers.

Five Lessons You Should Learn from Extreme Programming

Five Lessons You Should Learn from Extreme Programming:

1. Code for Maintainability
2. Know Your Status
3. Communicate Early and Often
4. Do Things That Matter
5. Fix Your Most Important Problem First

Interface Scalability

This article talks about building scalable interfaces for Content Management Systems, but most of what is said here is true for almost all enterprise class applications...

Cool XUL links

There has been an interesting discussion going on about RIAs in general on WEBGUI list and a large number of XUL example emerged from it. Some of the cool ones are listed below:

XUL UI Widget Gallery
Bugxula
Mozblog
MAB Amazon Search
XUL games
XULChannel RSS Aggregator

Please feel free to add to this list...

Matthew Berk on the RIA Development Space

Jupiter Research has quite recently given all analysts personal weblogs where they can blog about the latest happenings in the industry. I think that is a real cool idea.

While on the site, I came across Matthew Berk's weblog. Matthew has been quite bullish about Flash and RIAs in general for a long time. Here is Matthew's look at the RIA space, and not surprisingly Flash figures on top of that list.

...followed closely by Laszlo.

A better preloading API

Colin just started a petition on his blog asking Macromedia to support a better API for preloading MovieClips. Anybody who has tried building pre-loaders will have inevitably run into these issues, so it would be great if Macromedia will be able to fix these issues... right?

XSLT Magic!

Claus Wahlers of the Deng fame just posted this on his site. It's a way for the browser to display flash files from simple XML files. NO server-side processing.

You can see it in action here and read the explaination here.