Joop on Sugar

Now for Dutch citizins: The EuPod. ;-)

And another: http://www.cenqua.com/pairon/

I've been thinking to take the chatwall demo a next step. But keeping the Less Software aproach in mind, what to do next? Among other things I'm thinking about:

• accessibility;


• mobility;


• internationalisation.

accessibility

For real world use of any application accessibility is essential. Research shows that 10% of all internet users have a form of limitate ability. I'm not willing to dump these 10% without thinking. Open standards help. Separating content, presentation and logic helps when building or maintaining a application. With or without AJAX.

We would like to serve as many customers as possible. I guess that's what is boils down to, not excluding but including.

mobility

A mobile device is just a device like any other, be it a braillereader, speechsoftware, GSM or PDA. Important for many reasons. Portability is one. To make content, any content -be it an application-, userfriendly anywhere accesible, we must make use of some standard way of communicating. That's good: to keep it all digestable, sorteble, searchable. Also for future use.

internationalisation

The internet is a big world. Any open source or commercial application must consider internationalisation as an import issue. What's the current standard, most widely accepted way of handling this?

Today 37signals announced they will not build their webapplications to be backwards compatible with IE 5.5. 37signals is known for Basecamp, Tada list and is currently working on a project called Backback.

Sure, we could have hacked in support for IE 5.x, or built alternate versions for older browsers, but legacy support is not the way to build a forward looking product. IE 6, Firefox, and Safari are now the tickets to ride.

So today is the day we announce we�re moving on.

37signals build their apps with the scripting language Ruby, which gets alot of press these days. It seems 37signals doesn't want to wait for IE 5.5 support in Ruby on Rails. The're moving on. ;)

At the Rails weblog: IE5/5.5 compatibility wizard wanted.

There has been much ado about Ajax recently after Jesse James Garrett from Adaptive Path wrote an essay about it.

Jesse writes:

Ajax isn�t a technology. It�s really several technologies, each flourishing in its own right, coming together in powerful new ways. Ajax incorporates:

• 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.

Most webdevelopers have worked with all these techniques at some point. But the hardest one to use is the one "binding everything together": javascript. It's still very complex to make javascript work cross-platform in different browsers.

Now people came up with the idea to make a javascript framework, so that people like me, with almost no javascript experience, can start to play with the possibilities of AJAX.
The javascript framework which seems to get a lot of press these days is Sajax, which can be found here:
http://www.modernmethod.com/sajax/.
I've enhanced the chatwall example a little. Try it on http://www.laan.org/chatwall/.

This is great.. A few weeks ago I stumbled upon Ajax, then I found Sajax, downloaded the chatwall example and started to play with it.

Next step: I decided to put my slightly enhanced version online, and let the original author know. He responded by putting the link to my chatwall on his website. Many people came to see my enhanced version, downloaded the source code and... Sending me the work they did on the code.

The internet is great, did I say that before? Yep -it is great.

Try the chatwall for yourself: http://www.laan.org/chatwall/..

Now with NO FLICKER! ;-))

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