Chapter 3. Integrating the Behavior Layer

Capturing, reacting to, and performing actions based on users’ interactions with Web pages is the realm of the “behavior layer.” While HTML and Web browsers have basic responses to “behaviors” such as clicking a link or submitting a form, today these responses can be enhanced radically through the use of scripts sitting on top of the markup. The scripts respond to logical decisions made by users, thereby creating a responsive user interface (UI) and controlling what and when (or even if) anything is actually sent to the server. Modern scripts can even control a UI by receiving data from the server and modifying an existing page without a full page refresh.

In a Web standards world, scripts and the behavior ...

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