NYCPHP Meetup

[tedd]

At 12:11 PM -0500 12/14/06, Chris Shiflett wrote:
>Stephen Musgrave wrote:
>>  I have a designer who would like to have links on the subnav to
>>  NOT refresh the page.
>
>Ugh. Why not? Navigation links go to different pages (with presumably
>different content), therefore the URL should change. I'm sure you can
>manage to use Ajax and other client-side technologies to mimic going to
>a different page (changing the URL and such), but this is a perfect
>example of misusing Ajax.
>
>Just so it doesn't sound like I'm anti-Ajax, there are situations where
>it can be useful. One example is a comment form with a preview. To
>display the preview, you could use Ajax to exchange the minimum amount
>of information with the server as necessary (to process the comment
>using whatever filtering/formatting is already in place on the server)
>and display the preview on the current page. The URL would not change,
>but from a user's perspective, the page hasn't changed either, so it's OK.
>
>That's my opinion. :-)
>
>Chris

Hi Chris:

Not that I disagree with you, but I think the direction the web is 
taking is similar to desktop applications, which is refresh when you 
need a new window -- otherwise keep the one you have.

As an experiment, I set up this reader to illustrate my point:

http://xn--ovg.com/ajax_page

This is simply a text reader and there is no real reason to refresh 
each page. While the page is providing unique content each time it is 
"turned" (i.e., navigation), is still just the same window without a 
refresh.

tedd

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