Dreamweaver CS4 For Dummies®

Chapter 13. Creating AJAX Features with Spry

In This Chapter

• Creating drop-down menus

• Creating collapsible and tabbed panels

• Working with Spry validation widgets

If you still think AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) is just something you can use to clean the house, you're missing out on one of the greatest innovations in Web design. On the Internet, AJAX combines JavaScript and XML to create highly interactive features, such as drop-down menus and panels that can be opened and closed without reloading a Web page.

To make it easier to create these advanced features, Dreamweaver CS4 includes a collection of widgets known as the Spry Framework. Even if you don't know how to write JavaScript, XML, or CSS, you can use to Spry add AJAX features to your Web pages, such as drop-down menus (like the one shown in Figure 13-1), collapsible and tabbed panels, and form validation features, which I cover in this chapter.

Making Magic with AJAX

Web designers are all a buzz about AJAX because it makes it possible to create pages that are more interactive and faster to load than was possible with previous Web technologies. One of the biggest changes is the ability to add features that a Web page visitor can change without having to reload the entire page.

For example, at the highly popular iGoogle page of the Google search engine (available at www.igoogle.com), AJAX makes it possible to open and close it and to add and remove content boxes. Thanks to AJAX, Google users can

• Create highly customized pages ...