Proudly presenting AJAX-S!

The demo and the zip file are updated with a small fix to avoid generating invalid nodes while still offering the possibility to use custom HTML in any page, and the ability to display escaped code for presentations.

Updated the drop down to support pressing the spacebar and enter keys when it has got focus, to navigate directly to that certain page.

Important update!

By popular request, AJAX-S now supports XHTML code in the XML file as well. No escaping, no nothing, just write as you usually do! I think now that it is a real contender to Eric Meyer’s S5!

For some reason unknown to me, the XSLT files failed to work in some Mozilla web browsers on some computers when they had an .xslt extension. I’ve changed the zip file so it now points to XSLT files with an .xml extension. If you’ve downloaded a previous version that didn’t work, please try the new one. Big thanks to Karl and especially Henrik Box for doing some extensive testing for me (Henrik wants to meet the girls behind girlspoke as a thanks… :-))!

Release 2!

After listening to the feedback I got, I’ve now done some major updates to AJAX-S. It now supports incremental rendering, non-JavaScript users and also offers a printable version. Go check the updated demo.

Changed the JavaScript detect for support for the XSLTProcessor object so it asks users that lack that support if they want to go to the printable page instead.

Added check to scroll the current incremental step into view if it wasn’t visible.

Updated with a different look for active increment, past increment and coming increment, and a setting if one wants the first or last increment to be selected when backing from an upcoming page.

Updated with a different look for active increment, past increment and coming increment, and a setting if one wants the first or last increment to be selected when backing from an upcoming page.

Updated with a fix for two glitches in the keyboard navigation.

Add-on available as of September 7th, 2006

An add-on for AJAX-S has been developed, to automatically show/hide the footer of the slides.

I’ve been thinking about creating an AJAX-based slideshow for a while, and today it happened! Today I wrote my first line of code in this project (probably not the last one), but for the moment I feel very content with the results. The code is probably not perfect, but I’m going more for the concept here. The tweaking options are endless.

The idea came to me because I wanted a lightweight slideshow based on HTML, CSS and JavaScript, but I also wanted to separate the data of each page from the actual code that presents it. Therefore, I decided to move the data into an XML file and then use AJAX to retrieve it. The name AJAX-S is short for AJAX-Slides (or Asynchronous JavaScript and XML Slides, if you want to).

Naturally, one of my inspirations for creating a HTML-based slideshow are from Eric Meyer and his S5. However, I wanted to take it one notch further, to make it more flexible and also usable for people with no HTML knowledge whatsoever. Another motivating factor was to just transform the data for the current page, as opposed to creating all the HTML needed for all the pages when the page is initially loaded. A leaner end user experience, basically.

It only works in IE 6 and Mozilla-based web browsers as of now. This is because of the need to do on the fly transformations on the client, which means the necessary support for ActiveXObject or XSLTProcessor has to be there. I think Opera 9 will support XSLTProcessor and probably some upcoming version of Safari too, so more widespread support in the future is very likely.

A freaky thing, which I hope is only a very unimportant detail, is that when I run it here at my host provider, I have to use the xml instead of the xslt one. However, most likely a hosting issue only.

But enough of that now. Download AJAX-S or view the demo of AJAX-S. Please let me know what you think, and if there’s any major error in the code. Not a requirement at all, but if you use it and like it, I would appreciate getting credit for it. 🙂

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