More book­shelf fod­der com­ing our way…

When I was at Web Direc­tions South last year, I had the priv­i­lege to intro­duce Jeremy Keith’s ses­sion on Hijax. The pre­sen­ta­tion was one of the high­lights of the con­fer­ence for me, in spite of — or in case because of — the love/hate strug­gle I’ve had with JavaScript over the years.

The Hijax approach builds on the idea of pro­gres­sive enhance­ment. It involves cre­at­ing acces­si­ble web appli­ca­tion func­tion­al­ity with­out JavaScript, and then adding a JavaScript layer that “hijacks” par­tic­u­lar clicks and replaces the stan­dards HTTP requests with XML­HttpRe­quest calls and gen­er­ally Ajaxy stuff. That way, if JavaScript is not avail­able to the user agent, the appli­ca­tion works as intended any­way. But more capa­ble user agents get an enhanced user expe­ri­ence. And every­one is happy.
After Jeremy’s pre­sen­ta­tion I inno­cently asked the ques­tion “Where can I find more resources? Are you writ­ing a book on this?”. After protest­ing that the ques­tion wasn’t staged, Jeremy revealed that he was — and that book, Bul­let­proof Ajax, is now fin­ished.

It’s not actu­ally out yet, but you can pre-order, and if you’re keen like me, check out the com­pan­ion web site with down­load­able code sam­ples. The name “Bul­let­proof” puts the title in the same New Rid­ers series as Dan Cedarholm’s Bul­let­proof Web Design, another title I own and love.

So con­grat­u­la­tions on get­ting it fin­ished, Jeremy — can’t wait to get my hands on a copy.