I don't know what it's called but i'd like to use it - dynamic update?

I visited a website recently which to simplify my explaination, consisted of a menu down one side and the main body text on the other.

When a menu/nav link was clicked the text content of the body was refreshed very quick - nothing else on the page seemed to reload (no flicker etc).

I hope this makes sense and someone can explain what and how to achieve this.

At the time I thought that the main text would be in a table and that was all that was being refreshed, but looking at the code it was just DIVs
and didn't think you could do the above that way. I was expecting a js script or something, but I didn't see any script loading or anything similar.

Anyone an idea about this? Cheers.

The server was probably fast, the pages light and the menu and other items were in exactly the same location on all pages. If there are physical files or if the content comes from a database shouldn't matter much, but I'd rather think that flat files would be faster.

Otherwise it sounds like you describe FRAMES.

Definately no frames Pandy - just DIVs. The pages are light. As I say only the text changed, and yes the menu graphics are in the same place. The server is local too... well about 50 miles away. Is that "local"? :-)

So, is there away to only update a table of text if the rest of the page has no need to change?

Can you post the URL to the web site you referring to?

Yeah, I'd say that's local. As said, I think it just looked like the menu was there all the time. As Z s aid, a URL would be nice.

It sounds as if you've been seeing something similar as ALA's Let them eat cake (see the demo here.

Yes, that demo looks like what I thought was happening, and looks very cool and quick load. Thanks Frederieck.

Sorry, can't provide the url as its not live yet, but only in preview mode (OK it's live for approval / testing only - not mine but a friends site so don't feel confortable giving it out - maybe when it's totally live).

I don't understand the purpose of that ALA demo. What's the advantage of having all content on the same page? It would look exactly the same if there were 5 different pages . They could be bookmarked too. Now the "sections" can be bookmarked only with JS off.

I think it was done with AJAX, which let's you reload only parts of your site.

link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_%28programming%29

Yeah, but it's so KEWL!

No, it's the old show-hide.

These are cool too, Darin :

http://www.stunicholls.com/various/index.html (1. and 2. in this particular case)
(Stu Nicholls CSS with a little javascript site, as opposite to his CSS only http://www.cssplay.co.uk/index.html)

The ALA example keeps the content accessible when JavaScript is disabled/unavailable, but CSS is supported. Stu Nicholls' examples don't let you access the content without turning on JavaScript or turning off CSS.

I know, but still... they are cute