Scott Nellé.com

Now is the time of year when everyone posts their year-end roundup. They talk about exciting things that happened in their field of interest, and about the last year worth of posts on their site. Many pledge to post more actively in the coming year.

I have very little in the way of posts to review. In the 15 months since I made my first post, I have added a grand total of 8 posts to my archives. That’s a dizzying pace of 0.53 posts per month, or 1 post every 57 days or so. That’s pretty sad. I’m not going to pledge to post more in the coming year–such resolutions almost never survive through January. I’ll call this a benchmark post, so I can track any changes that may occur in the future. If things start to shape up around here, that would be great.

This is a basic tutorial that offers an introduction to the Ajax component of the mootools javascript library. At the end of this tutorial you’ll be able to use an HTML form to send requests to a PHP script and return a response without refreshing the page. This basic process is the foundation for most of the ajax that you see littered around the internet today. Mootools offers a simple way to get your feet wet with this technology, and plenty of room to grow once you know what you’re doing.

This tutorial is something of a followup to one that I wrote some time ago, describing the same basic process using the moo.ajax class, a precursor to mootools. That article still gets a fair number of visits on my site, but since moo.ajax has been deprecated it isn’t very useful. This tutorial expands on that one a little, but is essentially an update. By now everyone has heard of ajax, so there’s no need to repeat the introduction. Let’s get started.

What You’ll Need

• Some way to run PHP scripts. Many web hosts offer this. You can also set up a web server on your personal computer, which will make the development process much more simple.
• A copy of the mootools library. I’ll show you how to get a customized version that meets all of our requirements.

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Somewhat recently, Microsoft let slip the news that they are indeed developing Internet Explorer 8. Now they’ve released another interesting piece of info: As of December 12, 2007 IE8 passes the Acid2 test. If that means nothing to you, run (don’t walk) over to the Web Standards Project’s Acid2 Browser Test Page.

Passing Acid2 doesn’t necessarily mean that IE8 will be the browser that web developers have been waiting for, but it does mean that the IE developers have spent time adding features that many of us consider important. The fact that Microsoft is even thinking about Acid2 is a big win for the web, and the fact that their next browser will pass the test is huge.