This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Web Buzz by Douglas Clifton. Original Post: Ajax, BlogInfo and Duck Soup Feed Title: blogZero Feed URL: http://loadaveragezero.com/app/s9y/index.php?/feeds/index.rss1 Feed Description: Web Development News, Culture and Opinion Latest Web Buzz Posts Latest Web Buzz Posts by Douglas Clifton Latest Posts From blogZero

Here's an interesting technique from Central Scrutinizer that uses the Duck Soup Technorati API PHP class library on the server-side to make a RESTful call to BlogInfoQuery from an XMLHttpRequest via the client. This produces a list of details about the blog from its URI, which is collected from a form input. The client-side JavaScript then transforms this XML data into a set of XHTML unordered list <li> elements which are then dynamically inserted into the DOM. Asynchronously, of course.

Add a sprinkling of presentational CSS, and you indeed have an interesting technique.

Personally, I would have simplified the system a bit by returning the list items directly from the request object—or a single item list if no data about the blog URL was available (or in the case of an error). Some might have gone in the other direction, and used an XSLT stylesheet to transform the XML data into XHTML markup. But then some people like to use as many technologies as they can, and make things as complex as they can at the same time.

We have a pretty big bowl of jargon soup to savor here as it is!