Comments on: Ajax Experience Day 2: Thomas Fuchs’ on the Enhancing the User Experience

By: Peter

Peter — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 11:26:00 +0000

Nitin, Look here for an explanation of your problem with script tags:

http://wiki.script.aculo.us/scriptaculous/show/Ajax.Updater

Seems you need to define the functions as variables…

By: Nitin Uchil

Nitin Uchil — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 17:48:18 +0000

I am having an issue with using innerHTML

PREMISE
I am using AJAX request/response functions to dymanically update a div tag. The output string is HTML and is composed in a backend Java class (so no parsing of XML is done).

WHAT WORKS
All HTML tags like TABLE (and its subsets), INPUT etc work fine

WHAT DOES NOT WORK
1. If the output contained a SCRIPT tag to do alerts or update FORM variables, these are not effected. If there are other tags also, the repsone correctly outputs these other tags – only the SCRIPT tag is not recognized.

2. If FORM variables contain event handlers like:

the event handlers are not effected

What am I doing wrong?

By: Lee Fastenau

Lee Fastenau — Thu, 18 May 2006 22:26:03 +0000

We initially plowed ahead using innerHTML on an Ajax research effort at my job after digesting some of Thomas’s experiences with it. However, we discovered that onmouseover and onmouseout events on a container div were firing whenever we modified its contents with innerHTML (I believe this happened in both IE and FF). This wreaked havoc with the event handlers we’d developed. Using the DOM insertion method fixed the problem and made the events behave more predictably.

By: Allen

Allen — Fri, 12 May 2006 18:30:06 +0000

all speed aside, for me it comes down to the limitations that innerHTML imposes, if I’m building a html control w/ js and i want to attach a call to a specific instance of an object via the onclick of an html object, you have to do that with element.onclick = …, and you cant do that with innerhtml :(

By: jt

jt — Fri, 12 May 2006 15:10:50 +0000

oops: “Brian’s” above should read “Mario’s”

By: jt

jt — Fri, 12 May 2006 15:09:04 +0000

@Roy – straight DOM is way, way, slower than innerHTML. Brian’s “faster” does indeed mean “executes faster”. Look it up.

By: Roy

Roy — Fri, 12 May 2006 10:33:10 +0000

Just want to point out that innerHTML is faster for you, not for the user. Straight DOM renders faster. Extensive string concatination slows down browser script processing. So when you say faster, you mean faster to type.

By: Tom

Tom — Fri, 12 May 2006 03:36:32 +0000

Just getting started with AJAX, so more articles like this one with the current state of the art please!

By: Mario

Mario — Thu, 11 May 2006 21:08:15 +0000

innerHTML is faster than straight DOM and in most cases makes it easier to read. Those that hate innerHTML may be a little green in this field.

By: Brian

Brian — Thu, 11 May 2006 20:16:31 +0000

So earlier in one of the other sessions people are saying how evil innerHTML is and now Thomas swears by it. I’m really confused what the deal is with that.