Using Spry Data Sets to Refresh Content

Abstract

The ability to manipulate data without the need to reload the web page lies at the very heart of Ajax. Done well, it can greatly improve the user experience: pages updated seamlessly without the need to wait for all content to reload. However, the reality often leaves much to be desired. The biggest failing lies in pages that rely wholly on Ajax to load their content, leaving nothing for search engines to index. The implementation of Spry data sets in the previous version of Dreamweaver fell down badly on this score. If you disabled JavaScript in your browser and visited a photo gallery that drew its content from a Spry data set, you were greeted by a page of meaningless code. In Dreamweaver CS3, Spry was capable of consuming data only from XML documents, so it was impractical to point visitors and search engines to alternative content without building two completely separate pages.