Please note, new blog at http://www.acheron.org/darryl/

Monday, May 29, 2006Google Maps adds Australia and New Zealand

Can't remember if anyone has posted this, cause I read it somewhere, but Google Maps has released Australia and NZ.

Anyway, here is where I work (the triangular building).

Monday, May 29, 2006AJAX Diary: Use TABLEs instead of DIVs

I've recently come the realisation that DIVs are just too much hard work when it comes to writing a stable, responsive and rapid user interface framework for AJAX-applications. Our large AJAX CRM application used DIVs and CSS Expressions heavily to achieve a "windows-like", fluid/scalable user interface. Each time a new pane was added, so were a bunch of CSS rules with expressions in them (absolute positioned elements that reference other elements to set width, height, top, left, etc).

I've now gone back to the dark ages, and converted the entire thing to use good old tables. I can tell you, it is a LOT more responsive. A lot of people may not realise the CSS expressions are evaluated each time something happens in the UI. For example, if you move your mouse, then the CSS expressions are being evaluated. So you can quickly guess that if you're adding more DIVs to the DOM with CSS expressions, you're certainly not speeding things up!

I'll also mention that I am talking about an "application" here -- not a Web site, and our standard platform is Internet Explorer (HTA). You can argue all you like that I should be using DIVs for visual layout, but I think it is more important to use what works.

Tables are just easier and quicker when it comes to GRID layouts...