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Tough UI design call: Flash, DHTML, XSLT, CSS, AJAX?

I'm in the middle of a web project and need to figure out how to display some of the content within a main cell of a table (pretty standard HTML portal layout - header on top, vertical left navigation bar, rightmost cell is for content, footer at the bottom).  Sorry, no publicly-viewable samples yet - but consider the layout of http://www.kuam.com/news/14401.aspx and http://www.kuam.com/decision2004/ to get the general idea.

I've already stated how I don't really gravitate towards single-page websites, but this one needs to provide as much content within the scope of a single document as possible.  So therein lies the challenge.

I'm stuck on how to implement a rich user interface so people can get at the main meat of the page.  The cool/daunting thing is that there is a moderate amount of content arranged in several different categorial areas, which can either be broken up into seperate master-detail pages, or displayed all at once.  I'm leaning towards the latter, displaying the data within the main content cell all on the same page. 

I'm considering putting the data in an XML file and formatting it via XSLT & CSS, or doing a clever Flash thing, or doing some sort of DHTML thing with folder tabs, or maybe calling everything from some XMLHTTP process and leveraging AJAX (I've been wanting to put that into production). Or maybe a combination of them all...

Posted: Jul 16 2005, 09:35 PM by guam-aspdev | with 3 comment(s)
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Comments

Andrey Skvortsov said:

Why do you need flash?You have bunch of vectors on page?Go "http://sourceforge.net/projects/ajaxnet-library" if you are lasy OO programmer or use XSL(dicrectly XmlHttp) as main UI vehicle or combine them.Nothing can compare with it-even flash which can be easely replaced by AdobeSVG if you need some vectors but preserving flexibility XML/JavaScript.

Regards.
# July 16, 2005 7:57 AM

Jason Salas said:

Hi Andrey,

Basically, Flash is an option to providing multiple scenes through which to navigate the varied content areas. I'd like to stay on the same page as much as possible, but change the content within the main cell.
# July 16, 2005 8:04 AM

Oliver said:

Hello together, I think Flash is also a good thing to use on web sites. The main problem I see is that Flash often is bad for users do not have the correct version. Also, I think web sites should not have to much animation things. Web sites are pages for information, and that is what we need. The user interaction is improved using AJAX (for .NET I found http://ajax.schwarz-interactive.de as a very cool wrapper) because we can get or send data without full refresh.
# July 17, 2005 7:20 AM
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