Found! basic stupid users guide to ajax

http://the.taoofmac.com/space/Ajax

sweeetttt but kinda still not for dummys :P

adaptive path's look at AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript + XML).

Pretty thorough look with a few nice links to supporting info.

There is also a DHTML book by Sitepoint. Their books are generally pretty friendly and give you a good understanding of both what you can do and how to put it into action.

errr I read it all I got nothing :( it's a brand new thing to me ...

wish there was some air basic happy stuff. load a page in a page content like an old style iframe... hmmm

Are you sure you need AJAX for this? if you're just after menus and fast loading content then good old JaveScript (and well built xhtml/css) might do quite nicely.

For page-in-page content why not stick with frames?

(I'm trying to get to grips with AJAX myself, though I've found very few of my projects actually require it. The most simple solution is often the best)

AJAX is only really any use if you are building some kind of web app. If your just looking at building a site your probably better off with static pages. One of the issues with AJAX is that it isn't built for Search Engines so if you want your site to spiderable then you are still better off with simple XHTML and some kick ass CSS and if totally necessary JS on the side.

There are very few places that you really need Ajax.

i am developing a very large system and strated developing a fancy auto complete text box, similar to Google Suggest. In the end it confused userd, had issues with different browser and actually did not help people to use the search engine.

Much like flash, people are starting to use ajax without thinking about it's real benefits. Flash is great for vector based graphs and animations that are auxiallary. Using Flash for something for the menu of a webpage is just wrong. It makes it looks cheap, tacky and trivial. This is probably due to non standard widgets etc.

Can you imagine if the BBC news website was in flash ? No one would take it seriously.

Will

I always hated the interface of Flash compared with Director but now that it seem that Director is heading to the retirement home, Flash is the only game in town. I can't understand the logic of having a purely Flash site but as a way to show interactive information, it can't be beat.

Designers unfortunately are the worst culprits in the "skip intro" crimes against humanity. Try surfing a Flash site on dial up for more than 10 mins before you go near that tweening tool.

Seems you don't need it anymore but here's an article:

http://www.sitepoint.com/article/take-command-ajax

:)

my work: http://www.one-waymedia.com

Well sufice it to say I learnered a lot over this post and this link I found, bascily enough to finaly do the stupid users tutorial that i was after, and self loading pages.
http://www.webreference.com/programming/javascript/jf/column12/index.html

But I am now up against an block, the rules at that link the code does not load in formatted code like tags just a block of words. so loading in a page is kinda impossible... Any one have clues or a site that would better to ask this in ? I never get very far at stylegala in their forums and need a good forum for code trickery stuff :D

Just found this and thought it might be useful to you?

http://developer.apple.com/internet/webcontent/xmlhttpreq.html

Worked perfectly for me here in Safari, FireFox, Opera and Omniweb.

I'm still on 10.3.9 but that shouldn't make any difference.

Found this link a few days ago, ahem I am now prouldly using Ajax for one small area of a project, this is by far the bestest simplest intro to Ajax ever!!

http://rajshekhar.net/blog/archives/85-Rasmus-30-second-AJAX-Tutorial.html

yeah thats just an intro ... if you wanted to update an image on the page you could just use the same property innerHTML like so:

updateImg = "<img src='path/to/"+imageName+"' alt='"+alternateText+"' />";
document.getElementById('holding_block').innerHTML = updateImg;

where "imageName" and "alternateText" could be dynamic values determined by your script.

Useful methods for inserting stuff:
createElement, appendChild, insertBefore

This is very useful resource for DOM (checkout DOM element reference specifically)
http://www.mozilla.org/docs/dom/domref/dom_shortTOC.html

The examples on those pages might not be very clear at times, be sure to google for examples on other sites if that is the case, plenty of info once I actually knew what to look for.

[Must have edited this post at least 10 times!!]

deleted ...

sure, why not post what you want to do here lil I can see what you want to do exactly and other members can chip in, might help someone else as well ... (or uhm they could laugh at our final solution ... but who cares)

I know that this line:
getElementsByTagName('data')[0].firstChild.data

says grab 'data' and from 'data' only, not any other element within but only the main 'data' tag.

Looked around and found that you could use the range interface to do it, altho IE does not support range ... bummer

Using range
// this line need to change tho
updateObj('xmlObj',xmlObj.responseXML.getElementsByTagName('data')[0].firstChild.data);

// change to
range = document.createRange();
range.selectNode(xmlObj.responseXML.getElementsByTagName('data').item(0));
documentFragment = range.extractContents();

Then
function updateObj (obj, data) {
document.getElementById(obj).innerHTML = "";
document.getElementById(obj).appendChild(documentFragment);

}

You can check the DOM tree if you are using Firefox, go to tools > DOM Inspector

There you will see your P tag you retrieved and all. But the P tag somehow becomes an inline element and not the default block. To work around this, declare in your CSS stylesheet p { display: block; }

Again since IE 6 does not support range, this is quite useless ... (not sure abut safari support tho t does work in Opera 8.5 btw)

This is quite interesting to me, will do some more research post back if find anything ;)

did you find anything ? The last thing I want to have to result to is a new round of hacks for something so basic

From what I know about XML, its not supposed to have HTML inside it anyways (pure data only). so you may be looking for a flawed solution.

You need to understand the why, where, what and not just blindly looking for the how, ask yourself these:
1. Why use XML, will you benefit from using XML?
2. Where would the XML files be generated from? by hand all the time?

You are just looking for the ending and ignoring the beginning.

[Added later]
Looked at (my largely unread book) "Learning XML", its true. No HTML markup allowed in XML. Simple reason that XML need to be well formed, HTML 4 for example does not need to be well formed -- the image tag for example has no closing tag.

Actually, CB forums is not the best place to talk code, since cannot post code directly and it IS a designer site anyways. I'm very enthused about XML and DOM scripting, however what you want tho is not feasable in the way you want to do it, rethink it.

For forums, try these:
http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/
http://www.webdeveloper.com/
http://www.codingforums.com/forumdisplay.php?f=2

[Edited]
You might be looking for something like this? http://dhtmlkitchen.com/scripts/tabs/demo/index.jsp
also try dynamicdrive.com

http://getahead.ltd.uk/ajax/single-page-design

Hi tripdragon,

I took a quick look at your web page, and noticed something that would prevent it from working.

If you want the two links at the top of the page to process the script, you shouldn't have the href attribute pointing to your .xml files. Change them to href="#" so they will stay on the same page. Or use an image or another object with an onclick event attached instead.

As far as I can see, everything else is fine -- try that, and let me know if it works.

Errr now trying a different code base
http://aprilcolo.com/oh/ajax/a/

could this be hacked to run html ??

I got it ! :D
http://aprilcolo.com/oh/ajax/b/

! Sweet! Justice ! Only took four weeks to ffigure out :P
Now since I have it working both ways a loading in different content on the same php file AND a second php file, is this the correct way to do it ? Or should there be a smarter more streamlined method like, putting styles in a webpage and not in a style sheet is a no no sooo does this have that same kind of screw up ???:

nice job trip!

you probably have figured this out, you can display a "loading" box by detecting the "xmlObj.readyState" responses.

the concept I mean is like this:
loadMsg = document.getElemetnById('loadTxt');
// on 1, 2, 3 show a layer
loadMsg.style.display = 'block';
// on 4
loadMsg.style.display = 'none';

<div id="loadTxt" style="display:none; position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 99%; background: black; color: white;">Loading ...</div>

Go here to view the full response codes Webreference
0 – uninitialized (before the XMLHttpRequest begins)
1 – loading (once the XMLHttpRequest has been initialized)
(not sure its legal to copy paste it all here ... so please just visit them insead)

Just tried out Taconite, guess what you can have HTML tags in your XML, tried inserting images and list items in an example, it all shows up formated and all, but only well formed tags will show up. I'm such a noooooob ... I still don't know how to do it from scratch tho, good luck!

Found more

http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex17/ajaxcontent.htm

For all of you budding AJAX bandwagon jumpers this could be a useful starting point for you ;)

Mastering Ajax, Part 1: Introduction to Ajax