i’ve been up to a lot of reading and thinking and not much doing.

xmlhttprequest is, since google suggest came out in the fall, about the hottest thing since sliced bread. i love reading people’s blogs saying, “why the fuss, this has been available circa 2001, people.” well maybe not exactly. xml over http has been available. but that’s no good unless you’ve got an html client with good xml and dom support. microsoft innovated here, creating xmlhttprequest for i’m not sure what version of ie, and mozilla followed. of course mozilla/firefox has the javascript edge (brendan eich of mozilla created it) and all the passionate users and web developers.

google is no longer about search. they are about making everyone that doesn’t work for them feel bad. i mean, google suggest was awesome. blew my mind. it was like magic. we now know that was only a warning shot. then they blew everything out of the water with google maps. but now the rest of us, who fancy ourselves web developers, just feel bad. like now i’ve got to go back to school and get a proper education. or find something else to do.

i understand the architecture, but i’m not sure how/where/if i’d want to implement it. i love flickr’s implementation, where you can click on a photo name or caption, which turns it into an html form, and when you click submit, it sends the information to flickr’s api via xmlhttprequest. all this happens without a single page load. so you can go back and or forward without tripping over previous form edits.

makes me wonder why i haven’t seen any implementation of a blog commenting system that uses xmlhttprequest. i don’t have the time or inkling to work on a project like that, so i’m just putting it out there, a lazy web idea free for the taking.