Coding with Jesse

Unobtrusive Ajax at The Ajax Experience

I'll be presenting at The Ajax Experience. This is an Ajax conference taking place in Boston from October 23-25, 2006.

My topic will be "Unobtrusive Ajax", which I've described as so:

Learn how the separation of content, presentation and behavior can not only make your web applications more accessible, but also easier to develop and maintain. See how to implement modern web interfaces so that they are enhanced by JavaScript and still work fine without JavaScript.

Jesse will walk you through lots of examples and show you solutions for some common problems in Unobtrusive Ajax development. Although some of the examples will use a bit of PHP, Jesse will focus on the JavaScript and HTML, so you'll be able to apply the lessons learned to any server platform.

I'll mostly be talking about the practical benefits of separating JavaScript, CSS and HTML, as well as why you shouldn't assume people have JavaScript, and how to design (or re-design) some common Ajax interfaces to avoid this assumption.

I'm a bit worried I'll be the party pooper at the conference.. everyone'll be so excited about using JavaScript, nobody will want to be reminded about the minority that doesn't have JavaScript. But I think the presentation will be a lot of fun and I'll hopefully show people that it's not a big deal to support non-JavaScript users, and it may even make your code more stable and easier to manage.

If you'll be attending, please, let me know. I'd love to meet some fellow Ajax hackers.

Update Oct. 26, 2006: Click here for a write-up and links to my slides and examples.

Published on October 10th, 2006. © Jesse Skinner

About the author

Jesse Skinner

I'm Jesse Skinner. I'm a self-employed web developer. I love writing code, and writing about writing code. Sometimes I make videos too. Feel free to email me if you have any questions or comments, or just want to share your story or something you're excited about.