The good thing about web design (and the web in general) is that for all it’s power as a new medium of expression and communication, it exists in a relatively static state. And although in reality the web is constantly changing, you can usually get back to a web page after about a week and it will look mostly the same. This constraint can make for an excellent learning environment that is conducive to experimentation via trial and error, and the developing of a creativity that is essentially self taught. Incidentally, there is currently a new technique being put forward known as Web 2.0 that aims to take the web to new levels, by using a combination of programming languages to make the user’s experience a more dynamic one. More information on that topic can be found in a previous post entitled: Web 2.0 – Where are you?.

Anyway, the xml feeds that WordPress creates for RSS syndication are a good place to start testing out some basic skills in CSS. There is an article called Giving Style to XML that does a good job of describing how to create and include some basic CSS code in an XML document.

Some limitations with using css are: (taken from the previous article)

• Reordering and sorting of elements is not possible
• Generation of text is hard (or not practical)
• Adding functionality, such as creating a link from certain content elements, is not possible

Solving some of these shortcomings requires the use of XSLT. Now this is one of the coolest languages i’ve seen for the web. Actually, XSL is a family of languages of which XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations) is a major part. Read more about this on the W3C site. The article Using XSLT for Adding Style does a good job of walking you through the process, picking up from where the previous article on designing with CSS left off. For a complete review visit: W3c Schools – XSLT Tutorial.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

“AJAX or Asynchronous JavaScript and XML is a term describing a web development technique for creating interactive web applications using a combination of:

* HTML (or XHTML) and Cascading Style Sheets for presenting information
* The Document Object Model manipulated through JavaScript to dynamically display and interact with the information presented
* The XMLHttpRequest object to interchange and manipulate data asynchronously with the web server (commonly using XML and XSLT, although AJAX applications can use other technologies, including preformatted HTML, plain text, JSON and JSON-RPC as alternatives to XML/XSLT).

Like DHTML or LAMP, AJAX is not a technology in itself, but a term that refers to the use of a group of technologies together.”

The result is the ability to create highly interactive and dynamic webpages, with features that close the gap between the experiences we’ve come to expect from web applications and the experiences users can get from a desktop application.

Some example of sites using AJAX:

1. Google Suggest
2. Google Maps
3. Gmail
4. Flickr
5. A9.com (Amazon)
6. Yahoo Mindset

AJAX related information:

1. OpenAJAX
2. Cgisecurity.com
3. AJAX Web Blog
4. Ajaxian.com
5. Ajaxblog.com
6. AjaxDeveloper.org

[ Read the follow up to this article entitled Web 2.0 - Where Are You? » ]