[adambratt]

I'm actually surprised I haven't seen this done more around the web.

It does take more work to actually have to build everything twice (first placeholder, than actual filled content) but just using some CSS classes and any decent framework like Angular would make this pretty easy to do.

[spacecadet]

What do you mean? It's everywhere, but like the author said, 'in a perfect world', really, most of the time you don't notice it.

'we' use angular on our project and it does this by 'default'.

i.e. the HTML/CSS always loads right away while the dynamic content is loading in the placeholders, which in turn are the elements themselves that will be used.

This article seems dated, 2000? I haven't worked on an AJAX app since that time, at least one with pinwheels and white pages...

[dhbanes]

You haven't worked on an AJAX app since 2000?

[eterm]

I'd take his comment with a pinch of salt, that is years before ajax applications were even mainstream.

gmail wasn't even released until 2004, and that was probably the first mass-market application that really unleashed the full power of ajax and made people stand up and notice.

[spacecadet]

What's your point with gmail? It wasn't the first AJAX app- Building HTML/PHP websites and using file uploads to a server allowed clients to edits web sites asynchronously. This is clearly before your time.

[fryguy]

XMLHttpRequest wasn't around yet, but there were certainly ways of doing AJAXy things before GMail was popular with things like invisible refreshing iframes. I worked on such an app around 2001-2002.

[spacecadet]

No I mean the way it was written sounded dated, 2000-ish. If you did a tiny bit of research you'd know. But you'd rather fire off a 1 liner response.

[adambratt]

I meant using the content placeholders like Facebook does.