This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Web Buzz by Douglas Clifton. Original Post: Ajax in a Nutshell 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

On a tip from Krista at Digital Web Magazine, I learned that O'Reilly's seminal Web Design in a Nutshell by Jennifer Niederst was recently released in a 3rd edition. This is good news since the 2nd one was getting a little dog-eared and needed to play catch-up with the latest trends and techniques. I hope O'Reilly is planning on doing the same for Webmaster in a Nutshell.

Acclaimed accessibility advocate Derek Featherstone and Digital Web contributing author Aaron Gustafson both invested some of their time in the Nutshell book, and today A List Apart has published an excerpt from Aaron's work titled Getting Started with Ajax. The article does a good job of introducing the Ajax concept, including the JavaScript XMLHttpRequest object, various data formats that can be returned from such calls, and how to update the DOM of the page making the request using this data. Aaron uses the simple XHConn interface library and provides sample code, both markup and JavaScript. Keep in mind that ALA is not a programmer's magazine (any more than Digital Web is), so do not expect gory details here. But it is important for designers to understand Ajax development since it is a client-side technology. Or at least the designer's half of the equation.

And this leads to my point, something I plan on asking as many designers as I can corner at SXSW—in this day of Rich Internet/Web applications and Ajax (I really hate to mention Web 2.0), do you see the line between designer and programmer blurring a bit more? If you're not able to make it to the convention, feel free to post your viewpoints here, regardless of whether your area of expertise is design or code.