Thursday, May 11th, 2006
Setting a Virtual Table
Category: Showcase
Oneida, an E-Commerce site, showcases a novel use of Ajax to illustrate its dinnerware. The Virtual Table lets you mix and match cutlery and plates, providing a live preview as you update them. You can also set the table’s background as well (that feature worked for me in Safari, but not in Firefox).
The table area itself is actually Flash-based, though it’s not hard to see how you could do the same thing with CSS and standard DOM manipulation. The selection of components is standard HTML and Javascript.
We recently posted about Old Navy’s use of Ajax for its E-Commerce site. It looks like these sites are wising up to the potential of rich interactivity, creating features that are genuinely helpful in making purchase decisions.
(Thanks Jesse McPherson.)
Flash made it possible to get those nice drop shadows in there without having to edit hundreds of images, that’s why we decided to use it! Also, I have had no issues with the background switching in Firefox.
“novel use of Ajax to illustrate its dinnerware.”
Actually no, it uses flash and dhtml to do that, the Ajax only stores the persons choices to the “clipboard” and I think its very important to make that distinction for all the newer people out there. Just because flash and dhtml often run hand in hand with Ajax, thats no excuse to combine the different technologies and intermingle what the two do (which is extroadinarily overdone)
Error:
IE 6
Line: 109
Char: 6
this[...].style is null or not an object
/index.cfm/fuseaction/virtualTable.view
The saving of products to the clipboard isn’t the only use of ajax going on. The description for each product is being pulled through the use of ajax as well.
Ah, well they really have no need to and its really an over gratuitious use of Ajax. Just load it all up sort it out on the client side, rather than hitting the server up for a kb or two of data each time.
I appreciate that you are adept at spotting JS errors Allen, but that really does me no good unless you tell me what you were doing at the time because I experience no such errors during page load or normal use.
click around more :)
it happens when you click on a combined place setting, to a single utensil, and isnt really consitent, which is why i didnt go into detail