Anthology of Ideas

I wanted to see how small you could make a fully functional AJAX script that worked cross-browser and degraded gracefully, so I went through an old custom AJAX script and made it as small as I possibly could. In the resulting AJAX scripts, the post version is 410 characters and the GET version is only 359 characters long. The scripts are fully functional and accept the following parameters: URL, DATA (in string form), and ELEMENT (to update).

The scripts could be a little smaller, but it would really kill readability.

“Get” AJAX Script

1. function a(l,d,u){
2. try{r = new XMLHttpRequest();}catch(e){try {r = new ActiveXObject('Msxml2.XMLHTTP');}catch(e){r = new ActiveXObject('Microsoft.XMLHTTP');}}
3. if(r){
4. r.onreadystatechange = function() {if (r.readyState == 4 && r.status == 200){document.getElementById(u).innerHTML = r.responseText;}}
5. r.open('GET', l+'?'+d, true);r.send(d);
6. }
7. }

“Post” AJAX Script

1. function b(l,d,u){
2. try{r = new XMLHttpRequest();} catch(e){try {r = new ActiveXObject('Msxml2.XMLHTTP');} catch(e){r = new ActiveXObject('Microsoft.XMLHTTP');}}
3. if(r){
4. r.onreadystatechange = function() {if (r.readyState == 4 && r.status == 200){document.getElementById(u).innerHTML=r.responseText;}}
5. r.open('POST', l, true);r.setRequestHeader('Content-type', 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded');r.send(d);
6. }
7. }

Combined AJAX Script

This combined script also accepts a fourth parameter ‘p’ that should evaluate true if the data is to be sent by post.

1. function a(l,d,u,p){
2. try{r = new XMLHttpRequest();}catch(e){try {r = new ActiveXObject('Msxml2.XMLHTTP');}catch(e){r = new ActiveXObject('Microsoft.XMLHTTP');}}
3. if(r){
4. r.onreadystatechange = function() {if (r.readyState == 4 && r.status == 200){document.getElementById(u).innerHTML = r.responseText;}}
5. if(p){r.open('POST', l, true);r.setRequestHeader('Content-type', 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded');}else{r.open('GET', l+'?'+d, true);}
6. }
7. }

Demo: (Sorry but you will have to go to the full page so the JavaScript is loaded.)

If you use INAP and have noticed oddness with your full-text feeds lately, it may have been caused by INAP. Users that had the “custom options” selected would have their feeds trimmed as if it were a post. INAP 2.4.3 fixes this.

In other news, INAP is in the process of a major overhaul including a complete rewrite of most of its antiquated structure. When this process is complete it will be rebranded to demonstrate the totality of its features (it won’t be called INAP anymore because the name is too restrictive), but will be released as version 3.0

Inline Ajax Page was listed on Mashable as one of “30 good [AJAX wordpress plugins].” While I’m thankful for the publicity (it seems half the internet is scraping Mashable’s feed which resulted in a huge Technorati boost), as always, it was described as “Allow[ing] readers to see a snippet of a post, click a button and the remainder will appear without going to another page.”

I almost cried. That description fits only the 1.0 version of INAP that was released over a year ago–now it does so much more than that that it is almost like saying Google is just a search engine. Oh well, the traffic generated was good quality.

In other news, version 2.4.25 was released a couple days ago to fix a bug that occurs when submitting a comment using the jQuery library under IE6.