May 13th, 2010
Jason vs. Anchor Tags – Getting Results with the preventDefault method
Reading time: 1 – 2 minutes
In another post, Jason vs. Page Weight – Accessibility Series, pt. 2, I talked about a page weight problem I had with a client. In the end, the client decided to put a lot of data on a single page. In my opinion, this would have been a great time to use AJAX to pull in the data rather than just pushing it all to the page at load. The problem with AJAX is that it relies on JavaScript (reliance may, in fact, be too weak a term, honestly) and so would not have been ideal for search engines and would not have provided accessible page content. We could fix that by linking to pages with additional content, but we really want to use AJAX to show the data on a single page for all visitors with JavaScript enabled. So, we just do both.
Jason Corns is a freelance web developer and full-time Web Specialist for Systems Alliance, Inc., specializing in front-end and interface development and design. CSS, JavaScript and HTML master, solidly in love with jQuery.
