The new yahoo mail - yes, they are turning their mail interface into AJAX. You can try it through yahoo.co.uk.

The interface is much similar to microsoft outlook express. One noticeable feature is the tabs. Not the tabs in your firefox, it allows you to open new mails in seperate tabs in your page. They have coded it nicely.

However, still gmail interface is much better. It’s more cleaner and easier to use. Yahoo is still living with their crappy web banners instead of going for context sensitive advertising like google.

Google Maps - That’s one of the most useful resources in the web. And a good usage of AJAX. Now, microsoft live team has turn into it; Live Local.

When I first saw the site… mmm.. it’s interesting - focused into colombo. ZOOM IN.. ZOOM IN… I was thinking like… ok. no more than that.. No. It’s going going.. WOW! Yeah! really. Then I realized that they are just rendering a zoomed version of earier images once after you reached level. Since, these are not real images, unlike in google maps, you can easily (err.. i didn’t really mean it.) do it.

Well, they have a traffic detials which is working and not going to work in Sri Lanka for at least for next few more years and a driving directions feature. I though that it’ll give the same result saying that this service not enabled in your area. No.. It’s not.. they are providing it. Well, it’s not realistic. They are just running something like dijktra’s algo and displaying the result, but with traffic detials and so on, I guess it’ll be really cool on some other countries.

I was thinking like, if **someone** can start an open source mapping service like this, so that anyone can enter detials here and there, I mean people can add data into the map such as roads, etc; then it’ll be really cool.

I have been working in web development for last few years, and HTML for lots of years. When I was learning HTML, one of the most powerful hacks used was Tables. Yes, using tables for layout is the most widely used hack in the Web. So do I. I was living happily with the tables. And also when it comes to development, the usage of tables made the life much easier; the repetition of the rows and columns; wow! That’s wonderful; err.. I mean easy

That’s the era of tables; and of course I used CSS here and there.. but not widely. I never thought of a pure CSS design. However, things have changed a lot since then. I started to redesign the whole web. I mean my webs. I started from my unpublished homepage (still it’s in my hard drive ) and did much more. (Take a look at the ihub - it’s the final outcome of our internet programming coursework; the objective was to create a simple site; so, we used CSS to keep it simple ;-))

Many of my friends started to ask; why CSS?? What’s the advantage? hmmm.. well! There are some, and of course some disadvantages are well. You have much more power in CSS than tables. You can do whatever you want; play with layers, transparency, absolute positioning for drag n drop. And if you are doing an AJAX application, you have more control in a CSS based design. After you designed everything, what if you are not happy with the font sizes? Simple, just change the style sheet :-). However, there is a big disadvantage; you have to worry about the browser compatibility. Difference between the views from the different browsers cannot be ignored. As you know for almost every (I don’t just say every - almost every) question there is an answer; here comes another question - how do I find the answer? refer to the internet :-). You can always use CSS hacks to keep compatibility.

Google has pointed out few bugs in my plugin. I managed to fix them easily enough but the changes them self started an another series of bugs;-).

Anyway, with some effort I managed to fix them and meanwhile improved the core functionality of the plugin.

You can still download it from the old url.

http://www.sandaru1.com/clipboard.zip.