[UPHPU] javascript questions

[Daniel C.]

On 4/30/07, Webot Graphics <graphics at westernbotanicals.com> wrote:
> 2) I have a friend who really wants a flashy page for a store front.
> I have pulled him away from flash/flex to ajax/javascript, for better
> SEO, but as in the previous questions you can see that he wants even
> the product transitions to be really smooth. Is there a way obtain
> both smooth page transitions & SEO?

Ditto what Jacob said, with the addition that if you want a smooth
transition between products, be sure to do some preloading of product
information.  So for example if you have a next and previous button,
as soon as they hit next, move to the next product, and then load the
next-next product as well.  Okay that sounds confusing.  Here are your
products:

1 2 3 4 5

Let's say they're looking at number three.  You should have #4 and #2
loaded already.  When they click next, you show them #4 (already
loaded) and immediately unload #2 and load #5, keeping #3 in memory,
but switching it from the "current" product to the "previous" one.
This keeps the memory footprint low but allows you to quickly and
smoothly move to adjacent products when they click.

Sometimes people are going to click "next" repeatedly and quickly.  In
that case you can play the animation that shows them moving to the
next product, but in place of the product info (which you haven't had
a chance to load) just put an animated gif that show a spinning circle
or a watch or something.

Switching from a back-end, stateless language like PHP to a front-end,
stateful (word?) language like JavaScript can be both fun and
frustrating because of things like what I wrote about above.  If
you're at liberty to share your code, I'd like to see how you handle
it.

Dan