NYCPHP Meetup

[Nate Abele]

Ken, any reason you wouldn't just generate JavaScript to be eval'd on  
the client side?

I would think that would actually be more efficient, despite the use  
of eval().  It also saves you from having to re-implement more  
JavaScript language features, should you choose to expand your  
dynamic capabilities.  Also, (and the likelihood of this may be a  
little far-fetched), it insulates you against having your client side  
code misinterpret control character sequences embedded in the text.

Thanks for indulging my curiosities.

-Nate

> Date: Thu, 09 Nov 2006 15:02:57 -0500
> From: Kenneth Downs <ken at secdat.com>
> Subject: Re: [nycphp-talk] So who's using Ajax anway?
> To: NYPHP Talk <talk at lists.nyphp.org>
> Message-ID: <45538971.6000704 at secdat.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
>
> David Mintz wrote:
>> For you guys, does the X in AJAX really stand for XML? Or are you  
>> sending
>> back finished HTML?
>>
> Finished HTML.
>
> On the PHP side we send back a big string, composed of object IDs and
> innerHTML values.  Delimiters are pipe and a pipe-star-pipe, like the
> following:
>
> object_1|<span class="notice">Everything worked great!</span>
> |-|
> object_2|<table><tr>.....
> |-|
> object_3|<select><option>....
>
> The browser side cuts it up and assigns the innerHTML.
>
> We can also send alerts back for debugging, like this:
>
> echo|This text will appear in an alert
>
> and finally if there is no pipe symbol in the return, the js assumes
> something is very wrong and displays the HTML in an alert.  It does  
> the
> same thing if the named object does not exist.