What is Web 2.0 and Blogging?

Ok you may have heard alot about web 2.0 and blogging. The question is what is it?

Simple

Web 2.0 - in a nutshell is any website that lets the user interact with the website, whether it is writing a book review on amazon or giving feedback on Ebay about someones product. This is all web 2.0 is. It is simply a step on from the DHTML website, with the addition of letter the user input onto the site.

Blogging - This is really an online journal or your thoughts about something, this thing you are reading is a Blog, its like a mini website. It comes from the web log, which is the log that your web server keeps of all the activity through it. So a blog is essentially your reflection of the world and any given subject, from your working day to your favourite topic.

Thanks
Sean J Connolly
Visit AJAX Web Development Store

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DMS - Document Management, Webmail
BuzzProperties.co.uk - Online Property Sales and Letting

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DHTML or DOM

Ok some more basic stuff.



The basics of actually putting a webpage together, in most cases this will mean using HTML and if you want you website to be a bit more exciting then it will mean using a mix of javascript, CSS and HTML to form what is commonly known as DHTML. Simply put this means Dynamic HTML, or HTML that is dynamic, may be a drop down menu, mouse over stuff or any one of a million things.




Know here is one fo the major misunderstanding about DHTML and the DOM. DHTML came about quite a while ago, and in fact was mainly used by Microsoft,and did not make full use of the DOM. This was back in teh days where people used to code their websites using tables, and not CSS.



To clarify the difference is simply the use of DHTML used coding such as document.all which did not work in all browsers and as you can see does not interact with the DOM at all.

To move on to the DOM, the DOM is the Document Object Model and put simply is the way the page is built up by the browser from the base element down through the nodes, this is made up by a normal parent child relationship.

The major difference using the DOM you can find page elements, normally by simply using document.getElementByID("yourelement") although you can count down the page using other options such as childNodes, both methods alway for a greater manipulation of the page and a more supported experience in the browser.

Well thats it for this, I am not going to go too much into this as it really fails into the arena of design and I am a developer not a designer, but I mention this to make you away of the things you need to know about to do any AJAX coding.

I will say this if there are any designers out there who haev a blog or would like to comment more on the designs aspects, please feel free to do so.

After all web developers as like the architects and web designers are the interior designers.

Thanks
Sean J Connolly
Visit AJAX Web Development Store

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DMS - Document Management, Webmail
BuzzProperties.co.uk - Online Property Sales and Letting

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What is AJAX

Firstly what exactly is this AJAX thing people are throwing around the web.

Its short for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML.





What AJAX allow you to do is simple, it means you can communicate between client and server without the need to reload pages, and the current .net framework has a nice toolkit for ajax.

Now this is where AJAX gets a bit confused.

There are basically 2 interpretations of AJAX.

1. The normal understand which uses XML and JavaScript to pass communcation directly between the client and the server. This may be something like updating your shopping cart when making a purchase or it may be more advanced like returning your bank account information directly for your bank. Simpyl it means that you can receive information to your browser without a page reload.
2. The next understanding of AJAX comes mainly from the Microsoft side of the world. This is really an extension of using DHTML and aiming it more at the page DOM (more on this in a later post) now in this mindset AJAX simply lets you manipulate the webpage to make the user experience a lot more user friendly. Such items as drop dowm menus, drag and drop, tabs and so on. This is not strictly AJAX as there are normally not any communcation with a back end, although there can be, so XML si not used and it is more a simple case of a DHTML implementation using the DOM.

Ok so that is AJAX, at least as I see it, I am always open to comments and the more the merrier I don't know everything and I don't make out I do. I am simpy doing this blog to help people with web development. I may even, fi I feel nice, post some code samples.