position: absolute - Design resources and inspiration.

I don’t care much for advent calendars myself, but this is one I think I’ll enjoy: 24 Ways to Impress Your Friends. Every day, they’re offering one new tutorial on standards based web ownage, starting with 1337 Ajax sk1llz and typographical finesse.

The single most frustrating thing with AJAX applications nowadays is the fact that they basically break your browser. Since everything is done via JavaScript, your location bar doesn’t know what’s going on and your browser history doesn’t get updated. The back button is rendered useless, bookmarking pages within the application is impossible. Often, clicking on the back button will outright throw you out of the application.

Luckily, I’m not the only one who is bothered by this, and so now we’ve got Really Simple History, a framework that solves exactly this problem. I sure hope this will spread.

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Robert Nyman has released AJAX-S, a presentation platform similar to Eric Meyer‘s CSS/XHTML-based S5, based on DOM Scripting (AJAX). What seperates this from Eric Meyer’s solution?

The idea came to me because I wanted a lightweight slideshow based on HTML, CSS and JavaScript, but I also wanted to separate the data of each page from the actual code that presents it. Therefore, I decided to move the data into an XML file and then use AJAX to retrieve it. The name AJAX-S is short for AJAX-Slides (or Asynchronous JavaScript and XML Slides, if you want to).

Currently it only supports IE 6 and Firefox. Opera and Safari support may follow soon.

Valerio Proietti has released a nice and simple to use lightweight javascript effects library, based on the prototype.js framework. The library is only a few kilobytes in size and offers some nice animation effects you might like to integrate into your site. While I am not a fan of animations on websites, these are so simple they do add a nice touch to liven things up a little.