Safari 2.0.X Cannot Dispatch Events
July 5th, 2007Not at all. Not to save it’s life.
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XSS
May 8th, 2007Read up on Cross Site Scripting and be careful of it as you develop applications that allow users to inject markup into the data they enter.
A Baseball In A Wedding Cake
January 6th, 2006Never The Twain Shall Meet
Ran across one Java developer’s blog entry regarding Lazlo.
Swapnonil Mukherjee’s Weblog : Weblog:
It seems that it is very difficult to mix Laszlo with existing HTML/CSS/Java Script content.. But of course I have not verified this completely.
I’m blogging this because his take on it is similar to mine. He looked a little closer than I have. I’ll confess that I’m going on instinct here, but it’s a pretty good instinct. Flash is an also ran.
I’m going to reassert two points about why Ajax is better that Flash.
- Ajax is scripted access to the network platform, Lazlo is an platform above the platform.
- Ajax is a migration path from exiting form based web applications, Lazlo is an rewrite.
Lazlo offers itself on the false premise that Ajax is new and immature. The pitch: Ajax is a toddler, so let’s use Lazlo which is also a toddler, but with more potential.
An Ajax By Any Other Name
Ajax is old and wise, however. Only the name Ajax is new. The underlying software, JavaScript, XML, and web standards, are all old and wise, and well tested. Ajax in practice goes back years.
I recall that these guys a WebFX, Emil A Eklund and Erik Arvidsson, where hacking away at a browser delivered JavaScript desktop back in 2001. (Someone needs to throw money at them and their new Bindows project, whatever it is, it’s probably very cool.)
Myself, I implemented a JavaScript and DHTML point-of-sale system. That’s right. An Ajax touch screen interface, in the latter half of 2000. This system has been under constant evolution since then, and has a small, hopefully growing, user base.
In 1997, I wrote a DHTML user interface for a surveillance camera. No XML. No dynamic HTML, either. Pushing the JavaScript engine Netscape 3.0 to it’s outer limits.
A Platform On A Platform On A Platform
Flash has been around for a long time as well. Yet, it has always sat in the browser like a baseball in a wedding cake.
It does not make use of the browser’s network stack (smack me if I’m wrong), it’s rendering capabilities, it’s form controls and accessibility.
It is a thorough duplication of existing browser functionality, all for the sake of vector graphics.
As such, it defeats the technologies that make your site easy to find. Will someone please tell me how to index this content? Pursuing a Lazlo UI will not free you from the need to provide an HTML or XML UI for the search engines to read. Get ready to implement an traditional web UI in addition to Lazlo.
Worst of all. You will create a division in your development team, since Flash and Lazlo are very different skills sets from traditional web programming.
You’ll have to an additional, incompatible skill-set to your development team.
Respect Your Elders
Perhaps Ajax and Web 2.0 are doing themselves a disservice. There are a great many software consumers out there that are not eager to adopt a 10 month old platform.
If you look closely, you can see that Ajax the brand, is only so much software botox. DHTML and JavaScript are old and crusty. That should make corporate IT folks happy.
Microsoft was doing us a service when the reminded us that they’d been deploying Ajax applications, like Microsoft Money, for years now.
Technorati Tags: Ajax, Lazlo, Software Development
