This just blew my mind:

I would believe that it could be a person really asking for help to get rid of a spyware/trojan infection if he hadn’t used a naughty site as his own URL.

Anyways, why should I know how to get rid of it. I never surf naughty parts of the internet, honestly!

I just put up a proof of concept for the AJAX chapter of my book. For years I have ranted about DHTML multi level menus simply assuming that every user wants to have every page in the sitemap as an item in the navigation.

My idea was to make the enhanced navigation optional and allowing the user to decide initially.
Check out the example:

• Optional AJAX navigation

It uses PHP to only provide a chunk of the full navigation automatically replacing the current link with a strong when JS is unavailable and when JavaScript is available it offers a link that turns the navigation into a multi level tree menu loading the main page content via XHR.

What do you think? Helpful? I think it is a lot less obtrusive than a lot of fancy menu systems out there while offering the same options.
[tags]menu,accessibility,hierarchical menu,treemenu,ajax,javascript[/tags]

I finally reached the AJAX chapter in my book and had to dabble with it for the first time (yes I know I should have done it earlier, but I work behind a proxy in the office that doesn’t let any outgoing requests through).

The first outcome is FeedNav, a RSS feed displayer: Have a look and I’d be happy about feedback here on the blog.

• Check and get FeedNav – an AJAX RSS displayer

I just published a new longer article (40 pages) trying to explain the differences between DHTML and DOM scripting. The article explains what DHTML, the DOM and DOM scripting is and shows how to create a web page with dynamic elements like tabs, a slide show and a big product shot in both ways.

• Check From DHTML to DOM scripting now

The DHTML explanation is annotated with explanations why some of the techniques are a bad idea and the DOM scripting version explains why some of the assets are good ideas. As a summary:

DHTML issues:

1. Script dependence – Users without JavaScript get stuck or get elements that only work with JavaScript but don’t do anything for them.
2. Mixing presentation and functionality – If you want to change the look of the effect you need to hack around the JavaScript.
3. Assuming functionality without testing for it – what it says
4. Keeping maintenance JavaScript based – Maintainers are expected to change the script when they want to change the effect, and search through the whole script.
5. Mixing HTML and JavaScript – what it says
6. Blaming the user – Users get messages like “you cannot use this as your browser doesn’t support it, update your browser” instead of just not getting the functionality if it is not 100% necessary.
7. Taking over the document – one onload to rule them all

DOM scripting assets:

1. Progressive Enhancement – check if things are available, then apply those dependent on them
2. Ease of maintenance – keep the maintenance as easy as possible via dynamic CSS classes and properties at the beginning of the script
3. Separation of Presentation and Behaviour – add dynamic classes instead of changing the style collection
4. Separation of Structure and Behaviour – use dynamic event handlers and generated elements instead of onclick and NOSCRIPT
5. Using modern event handling – more than one onload please
6. Avoiding clashes with other scripts – avoid global variables and encapsulate functions as methods in an object

Of course, you can disagree :-)

help needed Apparently this thing is not as neat as I thought it was as it slows down Safari and Firefox on Mac enormously. As I don’t have the time to fix it right now (book writing), I invite you to have a go at it and clean it up. I will publish the fixed version with full credits here. I am not proud of this thing, I hate those scrollers.

Sometimes it is amazing how a bad idea from the past keeps popping up in different spots at the same time.
Some of you might remember when DHTML was at its prime, that every web site needed a news upscroller, marquee or other scroller. For some reason, clients love these things and many a developer started a script loaded with features and merrily mixing HTML, JavaScript and CSS to support even the most pitiful browsers out there. The DHTML Junkyards are still full of scripts hailing from that time.

This morning somebody on CSS-D asked for a table-less news upscroller in CSS, which of course is impossible, but just as I sighed and wondered who still wants those, one of our clients demanded one as well. Well, their development team agreed to implement one and wanted advice how to do one and still only use valid HTML and be accessible.

The accessibility of it is an issue, as are a lot of other things. However, I did an example and for the sake of it vented off some steam on the demo page.
Enjoy DOMnews, the DOM compliant, stop-able gracefully degrading DHTML news upscroller.