Ajax Girl

Christian Heilmann is talking about Event-Driven Web Application Design on the YUI blog:

The crux of the matter is that we don’t really yet understand how to build a real web application. We take tried and true methodologies that cover other development scenarios and try to shoe-horn them into something that helps us to achieve what we want on-time and within budget (and when was the last time that happened?).

The other problem is that we approach web application design with browser limitations in mind and plan only for what browsers can do rather than what the application should offer the user.

When it boils down to it, the main differentiator of a web application and a web site is that an app has much more interaction and is process-focused rather than content-driven. Users come in to achieve a goal: They provide data to the application, they use the application to enhance that data, and then they expect data to come out. They interact with components of the application and expect them to do something that brings them closer to their goal. It is of utmost importance that we plan for how users interact with the product and react accordingly.

When trying to accomplish this in the browser, there is one core technique at our disposal: Event handling.

He details the event-based scenario when he details planning for an Event-Driven Application, and taking events past the DOM. Do you agree?

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/event-driven-web-application-design