I've been thinking long about what subject to actually start this blog off with. Something to actually set a good precedent for what's hopefully years (or at least months) of fun to come. Well, what are the subjects to chose from then? I guess that's what you'd call a major question. Being the easily distracted person I am it would be easy to range from the absurd to the political to the nerdy but to make this sort of work I know that I have to decide on a narrow range of subjects and the one that comes to mind is web-development, in one form of another (depending on what currently caught my whims). Mind you, It's my own personal little sandbox so I will definitely stray from time to time.

Logically that's where I'd start off then, maybe by write something about the design and development of this blog (that's held together with duct-tape and a lots and lots of happy thoughts), 3NF, PHP, Javascript, Humanly-Readable URLs, or something on that line. (Some of it I'd have to do some actual brushing up on – god forbid – but I guess that they say that learning is half the fun).

But in the end it's really quite simple, there's only one subject that I can – in good conscience – start with, or rather continue with because it's been the first post in this blog for a couple of days now (and in a couple of other iterations, both back- and front-end revisions, before that) and it's the old venerable design-tool Lorem Ipsum. So what is this magical creature I hear my endless hordes of subscribers (I wish) asking (okay, I know that the two of you didn't). But I've started rambling so I might as well continue. Yes, I'd say, it's complete and utter gibberish but that's only half true Lorem Ipsum Dolor[...] is a more or less nonsensical place-holder text to demonstrate (or test depending on how good you feel that you are) typography or layout.

It's nonsensical nature actually fills a purpose because according to hearsay (I'm sure that they've made they've studies but I am far to lazy to look one up) human people have a tendency to focus on the actual textual content of a page rather than the typography/layout. One thing to watch out for however when using Lorem Ipsum that design-handicapped people like me (I claim to have a diagnosis!) need to watch out for is that it's a very symmetric text that will make a layout look far better than your (or mine, or your/my users) own inane scribbles ever will.

So here's my homage to Just Another Lorem on Just Another Blog. A wonderful mess of semi-gibberish (that you can easily procure yourself here), that has been in this world, in one form or antohter for 500>x>20 (with badly formed error margins) years longer than I have and hopefull will around when I am long since gone.

Lo(rem/ve), out.

AJAX, once a fancy schmancy buzz-word that was going to revolutionize hwo interactivity was handled on the web, is now a major part of the modern webscape. And while it brings many needed facelifts to the old girl it also has a tendency to break one of the most basic tools for browsing the web – the 'back' button. Clicking it on pages that asynchronously fetch new data and inject them into pages can have some more or less annoying results (depending on the mood of the user). Not only can he/she end up on a unintended page, it also makes the dynamically loaded content go bye-bye when the user tries to navigate forward to the same page again. A good example of this would be pages that add more content as the user scrolls down a page. Going back and then forward would on a normal page render you back at the same place in the page but will in the AJAX case force the user to scroll through all the content again.¹

One simply way to at least alleviate the problem with the back button (if not the problem with scrolling) is by adding breadcrumbs to a page. You've all seen them, they are more or less an ubiquitous part of multi-stage forms. They can be everything from something like this:

Blog >> Post >> Hello World

...too as fancy as you could possibly imagine (though keeping a usability feature usable can still be recommended).

While breadcrumbs have been criticized when used in a browser for duplicating the browsers back-button this is no longer an issue when the back button doesn't do what it once used to. If you are concerned about this then generating (or just showing) breadcrumbs with javascript will degrade gracefully, personally I don't find breadcrumbs a bad thing even on non AJAX pages as it gives a spatial sense of where on a website I am currently located.

Conclusion

Breaking the browsing paradigm can be a bad thing, if you let it, so just remember that while flash is all nice and good, it's more important to keep a site usable. Breadcrumbs can be one of these feature, especially on client-generated pages.

And on another note

There's actually one more benefit to be gained from using breadcrumbs – SEO (Or search engine optimization for you acronym handicapped people). Since they provide a straightforward way for a web-crawler to navigate from the deeper parts of your page back up to higher levels for further Crawling