Ajax Image Requests: Progresive Enhancement Techniques

As you’ll surely know, Progressive Enhancement (PE) is a powerful approach which, when used cleverly, allows you to develop more accessible and usable websites. It’s quite possible, however, that you have a solid background in the theoretical concepts that surround the application of PE, but still don’t know how to use this paradigm in some practical, real-world situations. If that’s your situation, then I suggest you take a look at this article series. In its parts you’ll learn how to take advantage of the benefits offered by PE when building some typical web programs, including dynamic image galleries and drop-down menus, form validators and Ajax-driven applications.

And now that you've been introduced to the main goal of this series, it’s time to quickly review the topics that were discussed in the previous chapter. In that part of the series I developed a basic image gallery, whose behavioral layer (or in other words, the gallery’s enhanced version) was implemented by using jQuery, which made implementation an extremely simple process. 

Of course, the most interesting facet of this sample gallery was its ability to remain entirely functional, regardless of whether JavaScript was enabled or disabled on the browser, thanks to the use of PE during its construction. In addition, it’s fair to note that the images that comprised the gallery were displayed through regular GET HTTP requests, which is perfectly valid. It’d be useful to demonstrate, at least for educational purposes, how to request the images by using Ajax and PHP, while keeping the gallery’s core functionality untouched.

That’s precisely what I plan to demonstrate in this third episode of the series. This will give you another example that shows how to use PE in a realistic situation. Ready to learn how to combine PE, Ajax and PHP in one single web application? Then begin reading right now!