I was idly looking at the web page for Wollzelle - the people behind script.aculo.us - today and took a look at their recent work for the Gucci website.
Its certainly a pretty nice design, and as you expect it make use of some script.aculo.us effects and they have curiously opted to include all of their CSS in-line in the HTML, but what really caught my eye was the way the page is created: the content (i.e. localised menu options etc) is loaded in via javascript using JSON! If you look at the HTML, its totally empty of content, but look at the generated HTML (i.e. after the javascript has run) and its all there. Essentially the entire site is generated on the client-side using javascript!
I’ve never seen anything like this before, and its certainly an interesting idea and approach to deal with localisation - its almost like a client-side version of what a CMS does. I’ve been having a bit of a think wondering what the real benefits of this approach are that ASP.NET (what Gucci.com is currently running on) cant offer, but I’ve come up with a bit of a blank to be honest. Apart than lightening the load on the servers and perhaps offering an easier way to do fancy effects at client-side, nothing really stands out to me as really convincing: have they really just gone to all this trouble to develop a javascript powered dynamically-loading web page just for the sake of it? It sure seems that way to me at the moment!
What makes this whole thing even more remarkable is that there is not even so much as a “Sorry” notice if you dont have javascript enabled - you just get a blank page!
Don’t get me wrong though - something about this dynamic loading concept has really piqued my interest, so kudos to Wollzelle for trying something pretty interesting on such a high-profile site, its just a shame they have ignored those without javascript.