An article at www.irishdev.com explains an extension of AJAX(the currently biggest hype in the web). What is COMET? First of all it is not an acronym as the name AJAX is one. It has much with AJAX in common, but the basic difference is the way the client get data from the server. In the AJAX case a client action starts a data poll from the server. In the COMET world the server keeps an open connection to the client and sends data triggered by events. The Emphasis is on “keeps an open connection“. This paradigma is not as simple as typical AJAX paradigmata are, it is a complete redesign of the typical communication between web server and web client. First it needs web server which not only support polling but also pushing data. This has tremendous impact on the web server configuration and its scalability. The two main web servers (IIS and Apache httpd) don’t have this feature. This makes
the use of COMET technologies very unrealistic. In fact the strength of AJAX was and is that it
can be used directly without reconfiguration of clients and servers.

But let’s look at the positive side of the coin. COMET of course is a systematic extension of other typical communication models, such as database connections, social or peer-to-peer connection and so on. Definitly I’ll try to write down some small code snipplets for demonstration….

The W3 consortium, the center of web standards, begins to evaluate the AJAX hype, hmmm…
The main activities are embedded into the WEB API activity, where the XMLHttpRequest Object is the starting point of research. In fact you could follow the acual status of the draft at http://dev.w3.org/cvsweb/2006/webapi/XMLHttpRequest/

This document is a simple restatement of the common properties of all the implementations
of this principal javascript object for AJAX. Perhaps not new but worth to read, because at the end (which is typically defined by the publication of a W3 recommendation) the XMLHttpRequest is a W3 Standard, Such standards always had and have string influence on further developments.

Another small activity it the aval project, a receipt to embed XML and CSS validation services into the validated page itself. Perhaps a nice POC (proof of concept) for the guys at W3C itself…

A nice introduction of the W3C point of view (?!?) is the talk Web of applications presented by Dave Raggett
at Google, Mountain View, 1st February 2006. definitly worth to read (and it is nicely compiled using the slidy slide generator tool). Check it out !

Oh, forgot to mention another AJAX at w3.org. It is the Tabulator, a semantic web browser, loading and browsing RDF informations. It was built by Tim Berner Lee, the inventor of HTML and web browser, one of the most influental person in the web itself This fact alone makes it worth to look at this prototype…. Wonder if somebody is going to extend it.

Tim Berner Lee also wrote a short post on Tabluator which explains the context.

I am still confused about the browser imcompatibilities. Just for fun I compared my nonsens pages
called pixelwald how they are rendered on the three most used browser , Internet Exploer6 , Mozilla and Opera.

Let’s look at my pixelwald11 experiment which was initially designed using the gecko engine of the mozilla browser. So my intention was something like

MOZILLA

Ok, fine. Perhaps you are not astonished that there are some layout discrepancies in the internet explorer

INTERNET EXPLORER

But I was astonished also to have a very different layout using the OPERA

OPERA

My continous hope was (and still is) that Opera and Mozilla are not that different at all. But perhaps I am wrong with that. Next step will be to explore the reasons for the discrepancies in this special case.

Perhaps all these different style could be interpreted in a metaphysical way. If you look at the mozilla layout it is really the way straight into the light (which could be bad if it is too glistening).
In contrast the Internet explorer layout only shows a wall, no light at all. Finally the Opera layout gives shows the path to the light, not straight ahead but curved, perhaps with a more mystic flavour. But at the and it is simply a very iconic visualisation of the different HTML block models of the underlying rendering engines.