So, this whole ‘Ajax’ thing set me thinking – why not try to make all ‘normal’ user interface components – date, numeric, combo boxes, autosuggestion boxes, image rollovers, menus, tooltips, etc. – why not make them all into libraries that you can include in a page, and then configure through the attributes of a node. E.g.
<input name='someDate' type='text' value='' subtype='date'
format='yyyy-mm-ddd'>
Then the .js file you include reads inputs, finds dates, and add the functionality you need.
I’ve already done this for combo boxes – I’ll put it on my site soon – and so I started looking into menus, and found some neat things:
- Almost entirely CSS menus
- Windows ‘Start menu’ like lists, similar to above but with more javascript (would need to work out the image reloading issue this seems to have though!)
- More CSS dropdowns
- Suckerfish Drop-downs
I didn’t know you could do so much with CSS. Clearly, it has come along since I last really got stuck into it!