HTML, CSS, Javascript and Ajax ...

I’ve just spent the last week on a course to learn some skills that should be pretty useful in the fairly near future. The first two days were a course covering HTML, CSS and Javascript. The HTML side was revision really. I’ve been playing with HTML for quite a long time, and even more recently as a technical author. I’ve also dabbled with CSS and JavaScript in this role, although to a much lesser extent. Fortunately I do play a lot with Actionscript in Flash, so the JavaScript stuff at least makes some sense. The final three days covered ‘ajax’ - looking in more depth at javascript, interacting with the server and looking at a couple of toolkits - the prototype toolkit and dojo.

I’ve had lots of people I work with raving about Dojo, but from the little play I had before with it, I wasn’t that impressed. Although to be fair it makes a lot more sense now. Certainly it seems pretty powerful, but then it really should be for a 15MB sized library of javascript files. I’m still not entirely convinced by it though.. I found some of the widget behaviour was rather strange and I was very unimpressed with the documentation. I did like the simplicity of the event handling and xhr request/reply though.

Having a quick look at the other toolsets out there, mootools does look rather interesting. And this is built on the protoptype toolkit which I did actually quite like.

I’ve recently acquired a new domain, so I’m intending to have a play with javascript to build a new website. Although I have to admit, I still haven’t seen anything I can do which wouldn’t be a lot nicer and simpler in Flash. The week has really reinforced for me the fact that Flash really is a very cool and very powerful tool. And I probably need to update my version too.. I bet there is some cool new functionality I’m missing! Yikes, I’m starting to sound like a developer!

source: cerys.wordpress

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