So, sometimes life just throws coincidences at you. I was just doing a little exploring on AJAX (more on that another time) and ran into Ta-Da List, a web application that uses XmlHttpRequest to its list UI. Here's the coincidence: Ta-Da Lists is from Basecamp, who I'd never heard about until this morning when Brian Sweeting wrote to me about a petition he's got to try to get Basecamp to do a "Building of Basecamp" workshop in Utah. I'm with you Brian--let's get them to Utah.

Ta-Da lists seems very cool. Here's a test list I made. The app is simple and easy to use. What's more the use of XmlHttpRequest leads to a nice interaction. How can you tell that this is something more than just JavaScript? Easy--there's no save button, so the server has to be told as you enter each item on the list. That's the XmlHttpRequest part. There's even RSS feeds from lists. That's the right thing. If only they had enclosures. Then you could use Ta-Da Lists to serve up podcasts and lots of other rich media stuff. Since its just a reference, it wouldn't add any overhead to the Ta-Da list servers.