I have an ANZ Bank account. Using their website to pay bills is an exercise in frustration. I only have one account, but the website insists on me picking it out of a dropdown with two entries - the first one, the default, instructing me to pick an account. Failure to do so results in an error - “Please choose a From Account.” I only have ONE! Assume that’s where I want to pay from! Then one must pick who to pay, with an option to pick previous billers from a drop-down list. If you pick from the dropdown without javascript enabled, you get the error “Please select a biller from the drop-down list or enter a biller code.” - with javascript it fills in a few fields for you, but why does it even need you to fill those fields in if you’ve picked your biller already? Fill them in when I click the “I’m done” button!

Finally, we come to a bugbear I have with ANZ currency fields. You can’t enter a dollar amount, it has to include a decimal point with two following cents; they can’t infer from a lack of a decimal point you’re talking about a dollar amount. They inforce this rule on their website, and they insist that at an ATM you enter the number of cents you wish to withdraw from the ATM. Given the smallest unit of currency available from an ATM is $20, what is wrong with this picture?

This guy’s gone to the trouble of finding out how to add “Did you mean?” to your own website’s search.

Kyle Scholz has developed code to represent Force Directed Graphs in Javascript, and you can interact with the nodes. We’re talking mathematical directed graphs here - you might know them as networks.

Basically, there’s a bunch of nodes and they settle themselves into a stable state minimizing tension between them - the graphs balance themselves out, and you can see it happening - it’s animated. And interactive - you can grab a node and move it around. It is ubercool.

Downside is that it sucks huge CPU.

Look, I know it’s just visual wankery, but it’s pretty and easy to use!

Sitepoint tries to figure out how well the Web2.0 works for blind people.

Basically, no US gov website, and none that loves blind people, will be able to implement a AJAX-only site - a noscript verson will have to be available. And this stems from the fact that it’s too hard to make the various screenreaders act in a standard way in response to changes to the document. Which sounds to me to be a perfect problem for World Wide Web Consortium standardisation.

Just out - Google Web Toolkit - Build AJAX apps in the Java language. Hmmm, Java = write once, run anywhere. Should be included in most browsers. But this thing compiles java into javascript….

okay, no, seriously, what? Why are we skipping over the sandbox and into the browser?

Two new AJAX have been released recently.

Yahoo AJAX Patterns has code and a set of patterns published under a BSD/Creative Commons license.

IBM’s AJAX Toolkit Framework is IBMs version.

Of course, Microsoft have their own version, called Atlas that’s built into ASP.NET 2.0.