[UPHPU] Convert a site to ajax

[Orson Jones]

> Hmmm.... I personally can't see much use for AJAX in navigation of the demo
> site you provided us with.  I rarely see the need for AJAX at all in
> navigation.

Right, I don't plan on using ajax for navigation, just the interactive
problem solving part. (I think you noticed this below also.)

> beandog (Steve Dibb) showed me a wonderful example of how he used sessions
> to overcome  those scary POST messages upon going "back".  It really is
> quite cool, and requires no AJAX.

Interesting, I'd love to see this. The site does use sessions, but I
don't know how to use them to overcome that problem. I suspect doing
something with the cache control headers would help, but I don't know.

Still, I'd like to be able to not have to hit back several times to get
back to the menu though.

> Holy cow.  Really?  AJAX has everything to do with Javascript.  I'd
> personally be scared to use it if I didn't know what it was doing on the
> back-end.

Well, I have done a little bit of ajax just playing around, and I did it
all by hand with no libraries. So I understand how it works, I just want
to use something with most of the bugs already worked out.

> I believe that the whole idea behind AJAX is to allow asynchronous
> communication between a back-end language (PHP/PERL/Python/etc...) and the
> front-end through Javascript.  Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think it would
> be at all useful to employ AJAX on a system that didn't need a
> backend.....?

Let me clarify, some of them looked like they would _only_ work with
_their_ backend. I want to use my own backend with some js in front to
help it a bit.

Thanks for the input though. The site works just fine as it is. However
I think there is room for improvement in this respect. I don't want it
to break when javascript is disabled. I just want it to feel a little
more slick and quicker when it is enabled.

Orson

PS. just a little bragging, check out the print preview. This is the
main reason I like using css layouts. It's flexible.