Over at Smashingmagazine.com, they have over 80 useful links to Ajax – based techniques.  They were so good we thought we would show them here too, save a few mouse clicks after all.

We feel these would be good to keep to hand, so you do not have to go through hundreds of Ajax related bookmarks, so these should come in handy!

We hope these prove useful, and we are sure that the techniques on calenders, interactive elements, visual effects, and animations, should keep you busy.

Ajax is after all, very propular for RIA’s, and we are sure that many of you enjoy using it, and use it often.

We plan to bring you more of this sort of thing in the future, so keep reading our blogs.  

For now here are the 85 techniques for Ajax.

Good luck.

AJAX Auto Completer

1. AJAX AutoSuggest: An AJAX auto-complete text field

2. AJAX Autocompleter / script.aculo.us library

3. AJAX AutoCompleter

4. Ajax autosuggest/autocomplete from database

5. Ajax dynamic list

AJAX Instant Edit

6. AJAX inline text edit 2.0

7. AJAX & CSS Flickr-like Editing Fields

8. AJAX Instant Edit

AJAX Menus, Tabs

9. 14 Tab-Based Interface Techniques

10. AJAX Menu Widget

11. AJAX Accordion Navigation: mootools demos

12. AJAX Dialogs, Menus, Grids, Trees and Views

13. AJAX Tab Module – Closeable Implementation

14. Ajax Tabs Content

15. AJAX Tabbed Content

16. MooTabs – Tiny tab class for MooTools

17. Dynamically loaded articles

AJAX Date, Time, Calendars

18. AJAX Datetime Toolbocks – Intuitive Date Input Selection

19. AJAX Calendars

AJAX Interactive Elements

20. AJAX Floating Windows

21. AJAX Star Rating Bar

22. Ajax poller

AJAX Developer’s Suite

23. AJAX HistoryManager, Pagination

24. AJAX Login System Demo

25. AJAX image preloader

26. AJAX Tooltips: Nice Titles revised | Blog | 1976design.com

27. 40+ Tooltips Scripts With AJAX, JavaScript & CSS | Smashing Magazine

28. AJAX Web Controls

29. AJAX syntaxhighlighter

30. GMail Ajax Style Username Signup

31. Gmail Ajax Style Check Username

32. Transparent Message

33. ModalBox — An easy way to create popups and wizards

34. AJAX File Uploads progress bar

35. Chained select boxes

36. Fly to basket

37. AJAX Key Events Signal

38. Disable form submit on enter keypress

Enhanced AJAX Solutions

39. AJAX Instant Completion: Rico Framework

40. Novemberborn: Event Cache

41. Altering CSS Class Attributes with JavaScript

42. Select Some Checkboxes JavaScript Function

43. AJAX Emprise Charts: 100% Pure JavaScript Charts

44. amCharts: customizable flash Pie & Donut chart

45. PJ Hyett : The Lightbox Effect without Lightbox

Ajax Forms

46. AJAX Upload Form

47. An AJAX contact form

48. AJAX contact form

49. Ajax.Form: mootools demo

50. Ajax form validation

51. Really easy field validation

52. AJAX fValidate: a high quality javascript form validation tool

53. Ajax newsletter form

54. wForms: A Javascript Extension to Web Forms – The Form Assembly

AJAX Grids, Tables

55. Data Grids with AJAX, DHTML and JavaScript | Smashing Magazine

56. Grid3 Example

57. AJAX Table Sort Script (revisited)

58. AJAX Sortable Tables: from Scratch with MochiKit

59. AJAX TableKit

AJAX Lightboxes, Galleries, Showcases

60. 30 Scripts For Galleries, Slideshows and Lightboxes | Smashing Magazine

61. AJAX LightBox, Sexy Box, Thick Box

62. AJAX Lightbox JS

63. AJAX Unobtrusive Popup – GreyBox

64. SmoothGallery: Mootools Mojo for Images | Full gallery

65. AJAX Libraries and Frameworks

Visual Effects, Animation

66. How to Create Digg Comment Style Sliding DIVs with Javascript and CSS

67. How to Create a Collapsible DIV with Javascript and CSS

68. How to Create an Animated, Sliding, Collapsible DIV with Javascript and CSS

69. AJAX Shopcart

70. Draggable content

71. Dragable RSS boxes

72. AJAX Pull Down Effect: Rico Framework

73. AJAX Animation Effects: Rico Framework

74. Combination Effects in scriptaculous wiki

75. AJAX Motion Transition: Fx.Morph

Useful Basic JavaScripts

76. 9 Javascript(s) you better not miss !!

77. Top 10 custom JavaScript functions of all time

78. Hyperdisc Materials: JavaScript: Top 10: Automatic Breadcrumb Trail

79. JavaScript: Top 10 Most Useful JavaScripts

80. My Favorite Javascripts for Designers: Blakems.com ?

Galleries, Resources

81. MiniAjax.com: a showroom of nice looking simple downloadable DHTML and AJAX scripts.

82. Ajax Rain: growing showcase of AJAX-examples.

83. Max Kiesler – mHub : Ajax and rails examples & how-to’s

84. Ajax Resources

85. DZone Snippets: Store, sort and share source code, with tag goodness

The download times with CSS are much faster than table lay outs.  The reason for this is that when a table downloads, it carries far more amount of junk markup than CSS.  This, as you can imagine, creates a much slower download time.  A table which comprises of 140 lines of code, roughly equates to cascading style sheet of around 50 lines of code.

Additionally, CSS has a big advantage in terms of speed, as all the visual information is contained in a CSS file.  Tables, store all the information that pertains to text, layout, and visual information, in the HTML, ASP, and PHP files.   In other words Tables intergrate the information in these files.   This creates a much slower download time for the website.

Cost can be a factor too in choosing to use CSS over Tables.  Some web hosting companies charge to host a website based on its bandwidth.  That is to say, that bandwidth, is the amount of traffic that is permitted to occur between your website and the rest of the internet. 

As CSS designed sites tend to be half the size of Table designed websites, the bandwidth tends to be less.  Additionally, with the use of external files, the bandwidth can be reduced further with CSS.

It is by far, much easier to redesign a CSS style sheet than it is a Table for the simple reason that CSS separates the visual information into its own file.  This makes life much easier for a web designer, as they do not have to separate all the information as they do in Table design, which as mentioned earlier is integrated into the PSP, ASP, and HTML files.

This also means that is cheaper to redesign with CSS too.  Especially if a web designer is being paid by the hour.  Though it can be argued that CSS has browser specific bugs, most designers are familiar with them, and know how to over come the problems, which ensures that CSS redesigning is cheaper than Table redesigning.

Another reason to use CSS rather than Tables in web design, is that it is easier to retain consistency of the visual appearance of a site.  Tables require columns widths, column height, texts, spacer gifs, and everything else to be edited page by page.  Because CSS uses an external file, editing one or two elements, can result in the whole site being changed in a far shorter time, and consistency is assured.  An additional advantage in using CSS to ensure visual consistency, is that it reduces the risk of error due to its simplicity. 

CSS also has advantages over Table based designs, where search engine optimisation is concerned, or SEO.   As CSS files have smaller file sizes, it is far easier and faster for search engines to search through a site to find those all important keywords.  Remember there is less junk markup too, and this also makes it more easily searchable. 
Another capability CSS has, is that it can bring search engine spiders to whatever it is a designer wants to show them by clever use of the h1, h2 tags.  This combined with good SEO writing, makes CSS layouts that bit better than Table based designs.

If you are not yet convinced of the advantages CSS over Table layouts in web design, hopefully part two will do the trick.