A List Apart: Issue 228

December 05, 2006

Soothe frustrated visitors by fixing your Ajax error handling and delight your site builders by stamping out edge cases. Everybody’s happy!

Ajax offers the ability to avoid both needless browser behavior like page reloads and useful browser behavior like error handling. When good web apps go bad, Peter Quinsey’s guidelines and techniques can help you and your users stay informed and productive.

Avoid Edge Cases by Designing Up Front

by Ben Henick

By the time they reach the coding stage, many web projects are a tangle of exceptions—and that can make standards-based development a nightmare. Better planning may be exactly what you need to avoid markup derangement or, even worse, a dysfunctional product.

A List Apart explores the design, development, and meaning of web content, with a special focus on web standards and best practices. Explore our articles or find out more about us.

Editor’s Choice

originally ran: March 07, 2006

Getting Started with Ajax

by Aaron Gustafson

“In a nutshell, it is the use of the nonstandard XMLHttpRequest() object to communicate with server-side scripts. It can send as well as receive information in a variety of formats, including XML, HTML, and even text files. Ajax’s most appealing characteristic, however, is its ‘asynchronous’ nature, which means it can do all of this without having to refresh the page.”