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Adding Ajax
book

Adding Ajax

by Shelley Powers
June 2007
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
400 pages
9h 52m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Adding Ajax

Chapter 4. Interactive Effects

All Ajax effects are interactive; the whole point of Ajax is to make a page more responsive. Some effects, though, are more interactive than others—especially those associated with providing immediate information based on some event.

If you've used either Netflix or Blockbuster Online, you've seen pop-up windows that open with information about a movie when your mouse hovers over the movie link. This is typical of an Ajax interactive effect, where the application interprets your intent. In this case, you can find out more about the movie and possibly add it to your queue.

If you've provided commentary at a site and can preview your effort as you write or before final submission, you are seeing another interactive effect. It gives you a chance to review what you've written, correct misspellings or transposed letters, and clarify sentence structure. This type of functionality isn't a requirement for the application to run; rather, it's an interpretation of what your web page readers may want—in this case, a way to preview the text.

Online applications that provide feedback when you perform an action, such as a red flashing effect when data is deleted, or a yellow flash when an update has occurred, are also interactive effects. None is essential, but they provide the page reader reassurance that an action has happened.

Each of these effects provides a signal that the application is aware of your intentions as well as your actions. It's not the same as clicking ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780596529369Supplemental ContentErrata Page