New version of Spry on Adobe Labs, now with hijax?
A new version of Spry has appeared on Adobe labs along with some updates posted in their forum. Two things catch my attention on the forum post:
- Switched to using namespaced attributes. Attributes are now of the form spry:. The Spry namespace is defined by adding the the following attribute to the HTML tag of the document: xmlns:spry=”http://ns.adobe.com/spry”.
- Added support for the new spry:content attribute, which allows the replacement of static content with dynamic content when JavaScript is enabled. This allows pages to work in a non scripting environment.
The first one is a workaround to the creative XHTML being used (and techincally is allowed, part of the point of *extensible bit of XHTML over HTML, is it necessary for AJAX is another post altogether) but the second is perhaps a way to address accessibility. Hopefully I will have some time to play with it in the next few days. I will definiately be watching the forum to see what people get up to with it.
A little gem in there is an example of progressive enhancement in spry/samples/products-hijax/ – take a look at that! Now that is step in the right direction. If you turn your js off it still works but the data isn’t dynamic either. I suppose you could achieve the same functionality with a php version pulling from a database.
Of interest to me is that although I know it is a messy way of doing AJAX compared to protoype.js, it keeps improving. Which is a good sign but I do hope to see some better behaviour in the XHTML 
Download the latest and give them some feedback! Oh and if anyone around here has tried out Spry, leave a message.
