Groovy Bits

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Description

These are notes on how this web site is implemented. The intended audience is web designers and developers. Groovy bits places this information in the public domain . Feel free to clone and modify the markup and code you see here. Groovybits.com blends traditional HTML with cutting edge technologies like Atlas (AJAX) and CSS Friendly control adapters . These are not flavor-of-the-month technologies , selected because they are the "in" thing at the moment. We use them because they work and they make our job substantially easier. For example, Groovybits.com occasionally draws attention to particularly important content by enclosing it within a rectangle whose corners are rounded . This subtle detail softens the presentation, making it more elegant, less garish. It's been underused on the web simply because its usual implementation requires the addition of fairly complex markup and custom-built images. Atlas gets the job done with a couple simple tags. The portfolio page uses Atlas in a far more sophisticated way: to replace postbacks with AJAX client/server communications. The portfolio uses a slideshow to walk the visitor through pictures and descriptions of our past projects. The images and text change without re-rendering the nearby menus and other page decorations. There are no full-page refreshes or postbacks. This slideshow is implemented with an <atlas:UpdatePanel> tag. It's purpose on your ASPX web page is to replace the usual client-side JavaScript for handling postbacks with a far less disruptive mechanism that uses AJAX to send messages between the client browser and the web server. This may sound complicated but its actually really simple to use. You just wrap your existing markup in an <atlas:UpdatePanel> tag and, poof, wherever your old markup used to cause postbacks, now uses a much more sophisticated page update system. CSS Friendly control adapters are used in this site so the design can be better encapsulated and controlled with Cascading Style Sheets. They also make the pages more compliant to W3C and 508 (accessibility) standards. Of course, since Microsoft commissioned Groovy bits to build these adapters it's rather natural that we use them, too.

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