Jesse James Garrett and the team at Adaptive Path have coined the shorthand term “Ajax” to mean the combination of all this cool DOM and CSS and XMLHTTPRequest stuff that everyone’s going on about. Garrett’s article, “Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications”, defines Ajax as follows:
- standards-based presentation using XHTML and CSS;
- dynamic display and interaction using the Document Object Model;
- data interchange and manipulation using XML and XSLT;
- asynchronous data retrieval using XMLHttpRequest;
- and JavaScript binding everything together.
While I doubt that these concepts are new to Stylish Scripting readers, it is surely handy to have a nice short name to refer to them by. The article runs into some detail about how he concepts tie together, and flags examples of Ajax-enabled applications, like most of Google’s latest innovations. The Year of the DOM is the year of Ajax.
Stuart Langridge and Tony Steidler-DennisonStuart Langridge has been a Linux user since 1997, and is quite possibly the only person in the world to have a BSc in Computer Science and Philosophy. He’s also one-quarter of the team at LugRadio, the world's premiere Free and Open Source Software radio show. Tony Steidler-Dennison is a Systems Engineer with Rockwell Collins, Inc., designing avionics and cabin data servers for commercial airliners. He’s also the host of The Roadhouse Podcast, "the finest blues you've never heard."
