Software Blog  RSS News Feed  What's This? Select a topic from the list below. Topics are ordered by date with the eight most recent at the top. Show All Articles July 19th 2010
iPhone App Development
We are moving on from AJAX applications to the development of iPhone apps (and apps for other smartphone platforms). There are many challenges in making this move, some of which are described here. July 18th 2009
Facebook Security Issues
Facebook has serious problems with its attitude to privacy, so much so that they appear to be in breach of Canadian privacy laws. Any action by the Canadian government will however be limited to just a small part of the wider problem. Facebook has to go much, much further. This article makes some suggestions on how I think they should clean up their act. July 5th 2009
Multi-Language Support
Translations of complete web pages have come a long way from the early days of Babelfish, although they still leave a lot to be desired. But what if you only need to translate individual phrases? Should you construct the phrase in English and then use Google Translate or do we need to do something more sophisticated? November 4th 2007
Working From Home
Working from home is becoming easier and easier as computers, the internet and mobile phones become more sophisticated. Why then don't more people (and more companies) embrace it? July 8th 2007
Using AJAX In Practice
AJAX is a powerful programming tool that is without doubt the future of the internet. However, until the search engine and browser developers catch up with the new reality, there are a few gotcha's you need to be aware of. April 22nd 2007
Web Design Trends
Web pages are moving away from fancy graphics to dynamic interactive sites with added value for users. To develop such pages, web developers need to be able to program in a variety of different languages. If you can't program, there soon won't be a place for you in the web development industry. March 19th 2007
More On Mobile Devices
Mobile devices become smaller and more multi-functional with fewer buttons and bigger, touch sensitive screens. Those of us with limited short range vision should be getting worried by these developments. Perhaps the science of haptics wil be our saviour. February 25th 2007
Censorship On The Internet
Some censorship of the internet is necessary. I fully support the removal of child pornography for example. But insiduous censorship by special interests is slowly creeping over the internet and eroding free speech. These special interests include web site owners who censor forum posts and business owners who deliberately remove competitors ads from public listings. |
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MAKING AJAX WORK FOR YOU |
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I am currently spending a significant amount of time developing AJAX web applications. AJAX allows a much more dynamic response to user actions than traditional web sites that change pages when a link is selected. AJAX is certainly the future for web development but it does have a couple of gotcha’s that need to be considered and programmed around.
If a whole site is developed using AJAX, then the main page consists solely of basic layout information and a few <div> tags into which the content is placed by calls back to the server using AJAX. When a user selects a link or menu item, then the appropriate window is filled with the appropriate information without the whole page needing to be refreshed. The first gotcha is of course that no entry is put into the browser history when the menu item is selected and the content changes. This means that the user cannot use the back button on the browser to get back to the previous information, cannot bookmark the exact current content and cannot reload that content using a browser refresh without further action being taken by the programmer.
One possible answer to the history problem is to maintain the user’s history in a cookie and implement your own back and forward buttons as part of your site coding Whilst this is easy enough to do, the main problem is that users expect to use the regular browser buttons to perform these functions. Javascript does allow partial access to the users browser history but doesn’t allow it to change or insert history entries. This is largely done to prevent unscrupulous developers forging a history that might infringe on a users’ privacy. Until the browser developers provide a solution to this problem, a site developer should only use AJAX techniques where use of history is not relevant. The bookmark problem is another manifestation of what is essentially the same problem. Since you cannot change the browser history, you cannot uniquely mark the current AJAX content so cannot bookmark the current content.
Using a cookie to store the current state of the application allows a browser refresh to proceed as the user would expect and allows the application to restart as it was last left when the user returns to the application in a subsequent browser session. This also partially solves the bookmark dilemma.
The other major gotcha is to understand how the search engines view pages where most or all of the content is generated using AJAX. The jury is still out on this one since search engine developers are unnecessarily secretive about how their algorithms work. My suspicion is that AJAX content is not seen at all by search engines. This means that a developer who is concerned about SEO needs to ensure that content containing keywords is always visible on the page using standard techniques and is not delivered using AJAX functionality. I am currently trying to find out how the search engines actually work this issue and will report back when I know more.
Do these limitations mean a web developer shouldn’t use AJAX to its fullest extent until the browsers and search engines catch up with the new reality? I would say no. The answer is to pressure both to embrace the new reality. Search engines and browser developers are the tail of the internet that need to wag to the dogs’ command. They should not be allowed to direct web site development as if they own the internet.
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