Paged Comments: Ajax Style!
I’m late on the Ajax bandwagon—and still not sure if I really want to be on it—but I thought it was about time to see what all the fuss was about. So, seeing as I have nothing better to do this Christmas, I went and grabbed CPAINT and have spent my time hacking away on a very flaky and highly experimental Ajax implementation of my Paged Comments plugin. It’s not (yet) as fancy and exciting as some of the Ajax demos available on the web, and may not even work for some of you, but at least it’s a start!
Initial thoughts:
Love the tiny HTTP response produced—returning anything other than the requested comments now seems overkill
Without providing a ‘show-all’ link, the comments cannot be reached by search engine spiders
I could keep the existing behaviour and include a ‘smart’ Ajax mode which would kick in when a capable browser is detected—maybe using Javascript to rewrite comment-page URLs, pointing them to the Ajax function instead
I’ll probably add to these as I come across problems. In the meantime, try Paged Comments, Ajax style!
There’s plenty of discussion on Ajax floating around on the web. I’ll be adding links to interesting ones I come across (mainly as a reminder to myself to read them).
Update (2005-12-24): Now using script.aculo.us for fancy effects better interaction feedback.