Wednesday, December 17th, 2008
Category: Examples
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Remon de Boer sent us a link to Achmea.nl, a Dutch website that brought back memories of Thomas Fuch’s Ajax makeover of Gucci’s website some time ago.
Ironically, Achmea.nl starts out by displaying a Flash-powered “Loading” graphic:
But once the site loads, it’s all Ajax. Powered by YUI, the site sports animated roll-overs, smooth transitions, and otherwise feels like Flash. Nice work!
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What makes this so special, the loading indicator? Ajaxian could post about a million other sites just like this.
This looks to be pretty well done, there’s some nice motion to the UI and bookmarkable URLs, etc. Not bad! The sliding motion can get a bit repetitive when reading sections of the navigation, but it’s still fairly zippy.
It’s still got some Flash in it for the harder bits!!
My question would be, what is the relative development time/cost between AJAXing it and Flash?
Since Google now indexes some Flash some of the reasons for making sites like this HTML have gone. Saying that I always advise HTML with Flash elements for funkyness. Why reinvent the navigation paradigm.
This does raise the point that if the Javascript engines are performant enough – is there really even a need for Flash et al for the majority of the UI swiz-iness
neilmiddleton: “performant” isn’t a word.
.
http://weblogs.asp.net/jgalloway/archive/2007/05/10/performant-isn-t-a-word.aspx
Loading…Loading…Loading… Gave up after 2-3 minutes.
maybe it is, but not in this context:
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/performant
.
But then again, probably not:
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/-ant
Interesting; I hate the loader at the beginning of the web site, but the web site itself is nice. You know, most Flash web sites (as opposed to Flash applications) look pretty much like this site. I wonder if there are a small number of declarative tags we could create that you can mix into HTML that would allow you to do these kinds of things much easier? One approach might be to actually allow you to have your information in normal HTML, and then have some CSS instead of tags that can control these things; think of it as exposing SMIL through CSS, then you can have your nice search engine friendly HTML but very easily do these kinds of things from normal HTML.
Since I’m a JavaScript shim guy, one way to accelerate this would be to create a drop-in JavaScript library that can parse and work with these CSS properties now. If only Mozilla made it possible to access custom CSS properties…. (they have been stubborn about this — the CSS spec, unlike HTML, says you should drop custom CSS properties which makes experimentation on the web for CSS impossible): https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=116694
Well it’s ok I guess, but nothing loads when JavaScript is disabled. I’ve seen several Ajaxed ‘mock Flash’ sites – including ones I’ve done recently – that are still fully functional even without JavaScript enabled.
I wonder how SEO works with this site.
No graceful degradation: totally inaccessible for the robot and that’s a pretty bad practice. I like the effects though (and how it is not jQuery) :)
@ pkenoyer & deadcabbit turn off javascript and then go to http://www.achmea.nl.. you’ll see a static HTML website
greetz
I could not click anywhere, the screen “froze”. But got this JS error (firefox 3.0.5):
YAHOO.util.Dom.get(“loadContainerMain”).stopLoading is not a function
Kildefil: http://www.achmea.nl/js/AchmeaApp.js
Linje: 868
@Mareden: did that and it’s totally useless, there’s pretty much no content.
@deadcabbit it’s full of links to all the content, so i guess enough to spider for SE’s