Todd Huss

With all of the hype around Ajax it’s easy to think you might need an MVC framework with baked in Ajax support like Rails ActionPack or JBoss Seam to make Ajax easy. However, libraries like Prototype (which is what Rails uses) make it so easy that it’s a snap to Ajax enable even the crustiest legacy web application!

Let’s take a look at what it takes to put a simple unordered list on a page with a refresh button to refresh the list without doing and page reload and then we’ll spruce it up a bit:
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At GreatSchools we’ve had 3rd party ad server outages or slowness effectively make our site unusable as users browsers waited for certain ads to render before rendering the rest of the page. I had originally thought just specifying height and width of the div element around the ad would be enough for the browser to move on given a slow ad load but in my tests with various ad servers that turned out not to be the case. After some research I discovered that the trick that some sites (such as Digg.com) employ is called source ordered content where you put the content in the order you’d really like it in (be it for SEO or for deferring ad calls) and then using CSS or Javascript to move it to the proper place.
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Update 4/11/06: I’ve received some criticism on this post from people who assumed I was saying you should never use image tags in HTML. My bad for the misleading title, I’ve added to the title in parens to be more concise! For those that didn’t read the whole post, in the last paragraph I say that it’s fine to use HTML image tags for content, I just think it’s bad design to use image tags for style elements. Anyhow, thanks for all the feedback (postive and negative) and here’s the original post:

CSS offers us a lot of power to style and decorate our pages with images, however, replacing text with an image is one gap not well addressed by CSS such that you often see sites doing:

<a href=”/”><img alt=”Home” src=”home.gif”/></a>

which is obviously bad for 2 reasons:
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