More fun with Javascript and CSS
Working on a little example of panning images with javascript. So far it doesn't do image boundary detection. It also just pans one large image, not a tiled and continously loading set, like Google Maps.
javascript
Trigonometry and Javascript
Had some fun this weekend playing with Javascript, trying draw dynamic lines. Since Javascript doesn't actually have any kind of Draw() or Paint() methods, it comes down to manipulating images. I originally started by scaling images of lines, but even after adding a bunch of variations of lines for different lengths and angles, it always looked damn ugly.
Finally I decided to go the traditional line drawing way: One pixel at a time. Well, almost.. i have tiny segments with lovely alpha blurred edges and created them in horizontal, vertical and the two diagonal variations. And i create dashed lines from them, calculating points along the line.
The current state of this experiment can be found here. (Note: This does not work in IE right now. Really only because i didn't put in the alternate code for finding the mouse coordinates, so i'll fix that in time).
Next, time to play with XmlHttp and generate finalized line segments on the fly and place them, as well as save the information so you can recall the paths drawn. Then, I'll look into emulating the google maps code for panning the background around and bringing in offscreen content on the fly.
Asynchronous Postback in Web Applications
So a while back I read an an article about the Client Callback Feature in ASP.NET 2.0, which allows ASP.NET 2.0 to do updates to a page without a full page rountrip to the server. But wouldn't you know it, it was specific to Internet Explorer. The article ended on a hopeful note with:
Please note that not every browser supports client callbacks, so two new boolean properties named SupportsCallback and SupportsXmlHttp were added to the Request.Browser object. Currently, both properties will return the same value, but the two properties were created because client callbacks might be implemented using a different technique other than the XMLHTTP ActiveX object in the future.
2.0 is still not out, but cross-browser support using XMLHttpRequest is certainly possible to anyone wanting to roll their own code. A very nice example of this can be found here.
ASP.NET 2.0 isn't out yet. So i figured, i might as well see if the stance for Client Callbacks and cross-browser support has changed since that first article. Info was only vague, but i think the answer is indeed maybe? -- at least if this blog post is favorably interpreted... Although this blog did not interpret it as such...
If it's not in there, I'm sure going to find out how hard it would be to subclass the appropriate classes to create a W3C XMLHttpRequest capable version