Images in a dropdown list - SELECT

Rumours says that Microsoft will announce support for jQuery in SharePoint 2010, so better get started. We have used AJAX and more recently jQuery for the last 3 years in combination with SharePoint and it has proved very useful. And even if Microsoft don't support jQuery I believe it will be a major development platform for advanced end-user interfaces in the future - also for SharePoint.

Check out this example for how to enhance your existing drop down lists to include images - yes, it looks so much nicer - and navigation is like a dream.

jQuery library for SharePoint services

Using AJAX and jQuery to retrieve data from SharePoint and present it to end-users in advanced end-user interfaces is certainly the way forward.Check out this library for more information. Looks quite promising and have done some tests.

Asynchronous Javascript And XML - and SharePoint

Asynchronous Javascript And XML (AJAX) technology is not really a new technology - I still remember when Marc Andreessen introduced a similar concept at Netscape's developer conference in New York in the fall of 1996. The main difference was the fact that his concept at that time was based on CORBA - but the idea was the same. Luckily we now have an object oriented language, JavaScript, a widespead communications protocol, http, and a universal language for specifying data, XML.

At Exformatics, we now combine AJAX technology with SharePoint - in order to provide better end-user interfaces and faster response times. Check it out.

Standard based javascript libraries like jQuery might be interesting to investigate.