I just put up a new version of Black Box at http://www.bibeault.org/blackbox. For those familiar with the previous version please don't get too excited; there are no user-visible changes.

Rather, I've made a change in some of the technology used to drive the game.

Originally. in order to avoid having to refresh the screen every time a "move" was made, which caused an annoying and disconerting "flash", I had instituted a mechansim whereby a "behind the scenes" request would take place by sending the request to a hidden iframe. The returning response contained Javascript commands that called mechanisms on the main page to update the display.

This newest version of Black Box replaces the iframe mechanism with the newly sexy XMLHttpRequest mechanism -- "newly sexy" because even though this object has been around for a while, its use by Google has brought it a great deal of recent attention.

This technology -- sometimes dubbed "AJAX", an acronym that just makes my skin crawl for some unknown reason -- allows "behind the scenes" requests to be made without having to create requests to hidden windows.

For more details on how the game is constructed, please visit the game site and click on the "colophon" link.

Oh, and have fun playing the game too!