Time passes and things change. Dave's original suggestion here is now entirely doable using the new buzzword web technology AJAX. This is a collection of technologies supported by new browsers that let the web application (something like dmtree) receive queries from and update just parts of a web page without refreshing the whole page.

AJAX is a broad name for the tricks behind gmail and google maps and web pages like that which seem a little more like desktop applications. For example, you can just click and drag in google maps to move the map and the whole page doesn't get reloaded from the server. Similarly, we could use this technology to have the [x new posts] and [x new comments] counters update without having to reload the front page.

The tradeoff is a higher load on the server and a small bandwidth hit. Still I imagine this is something we will see here. Not at the very top of the list, but I just remembered this post so I thought I'd comment again now that the tech has changed.
- jim 11-20-2005 1:40 am





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