Dreamweaver CS5: The Missing Manual

What is Spry?

You’ve already seen Spry in action in Chapters Chapter 5 and Chapter 12, where you learned about the Spry Menu Bar and Spry Validation widgets. But what exactly is Spry? It isn’t just a Dreamweaver tool; it’s a technology developed by Adobe, and distributed freely and independently on the Adobe Labs website (http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/spry/).

It’s officially called the "Spry framework for Ajax” and it’s a collection of JavaScript programs that let you, the web designer, offer sophisticated control of a web page to your visitors through widgets, effects, and data sets. A widget is an interface element like a menu bar, form validation message, or set of tabbed panels that generally makes a site easier to use. For example, the Spry Menu Bar adds a lot of links to a compact navigation bar, so you can easily find your way around a site.

An effect is a visual treat that doesn’t necessarily improve how a web page works, but adds cool eye candy. You can use a Spry effect to fade page elements in and out of view (you’ll learn all about effects in the next chapter).

Finally, a Spry data set is a data presentation format that’s more interactive than a standard HTML table. Imagine you have a table listing products your company sells. The table displays one product per row, with columns for product name, price, and availability. A visitor can sort a Spry data table by any of these columns, simply by clicking the name of the column. And that all happens without the browser ...