Tabula Mapa
I was struck with a mild productive streak today and finally crammed the map navigation as was into a frame in the Django pages. The final tidying was to use a template for the frame that put the map and the control elements into a table (“Tables? No-one uses tables any more!“) so that they are at least placed somewhat sensibly.
Of course, having done that, I hear echoes of the presentations I talked about where both Adrian Holovaty and David Hansson seemed very sure that AJAX was the only way to move forward. In particular, I was struck by David Hansson at one point being highly dismissive of the “old way” of using hidden iframes for partial updates, which is exactly how my page works. Clearly, having the browser running code that allows rich client behaviours is ideal for a game. I can’t argue with the potential and I don’t have any difficulty understanding the methodology, however, I’m pretty sure that the reason this stuff wasn’t common before is as much to do with Javascript being a complete nightmare as it is to do with any browser capability/compatibility issues.
The thought of writing a whole set of UI elements and code to push and pull data in Javascript makes me feel extremely ill. I have no doubt that there are loads of helpful libs and such-like out there, but right now I really don’t want to go through the pain of investigating and experimenting with it. I think I will wait until Django gets whatever level of AJAX support it is going to get and considering my recent workrate, I think it’s safe to assume that I’m not about to implement a ton of stuff in the meantime that will need re-coding.
Anyway, I just need to tidy some stuff up and create a separate development and release area for the web code and I can replace the link on the right with an all new and completely similar one before maybe getting around to actually working on the game again.
