Re: [Fofredux-devel] Re: keyboard shortcut discussion

[Benjamin S. <bs...@cr...>]

On Thu, Dec 01, 2005 at 03:33:46PM -0700, Kevin wrote:
> > Very good suggestions. I really like changing the link to "Today's
> > Unread items". And the ajax stuff sounds intriguing, though I imagine
> > you don't actually need Ajax. Or do you actually wait for a server
> > response before removing the div from the DOM? (ba-dim-dim :)  This
> > would be very nice - as long as it degrades to non-js browsers.
> 
> I'm playing with xajax on a side project at work.  I'm impressed with how
> easy it is to manipulate the DOM from the server side.  So with very
> little effort we could do exactly what you describe above.  An event on
> the client sends a request to the server marking an item as read, then the
> server sends a response back to the client telling it to hide/remove the
> item from the page.  All without a refresh on view.php.  Nice, huh?

This is exactly what I already had implemented.  Yes, it waited to
remove the div until it got a "confirmed that this is marked as read"
from the server, but it could instead be done by just building up a list
without actually making the remote call (move the "read" articles down
to the bottom of the page into a "read" bin or something).

I have not used xajax, but here's what I have used:

In my on disk hack against old FOF, I used prototype.js, which was
poorly documented and I believe originated out of Rails.  I would not
use this again.

For my last work project, I used Sajax, which I liked a lot because it
made it really easy to bind ajax functions to specific php/perl/whatever
functions on the server, and it generated all the ajax functions for
you, and you were able to specify an arbitrary callback function.  I
especially liked the ability to specify the arbitrary callback function,
because it gave me a lot more flexibility to do exactly what I needed to
do.

And making it degrade is easy, because we could just make the AJAX read
functionality be hidden unless javascript is available to enable it.

No matter how I do this, I 1. already have at least one version of it
implemented, and 2. it's pretty easy.  I'll work on it some tonight.

--Benjy