Maybe I forgot to mention this in my talk about why I hate AJAX but this is a very good point against a lot of AJAX use. If I have to wait for the content I might as well see the whole screen redrawn – it’ll wake me up after the loading is done. If you’re able to guarantee an instant response do it, otherwise don’t. How would you feel about “suggests” that you can see 10 seconds after you typed something?
If you weren’t able to see me talk about AJAX – I hate it because so much of its use is just plain wrong and the perpetrators should have their clicking fingers broken and internet connection reduced to 2400bps.
Talking about talks – a new season of Spletne urice, weekly talks at the local multimedia center Cyberpipe is starting next week. I hope we’ll get some foreign speakers this year – we’re offering costs to cover the trip to lovely Slovenia and a limited number of hotel nights so you can see the countryside. If you have no idea where Slovenia is or what it’s like let me just point you to slovenia.info and tell you that you can see the mountains and the sea in just two hours.
Ajax has so much potential. It is NOT a sacred art only to be used in special circumstances. It can be and should be exploited as much as possible. It will become the standard for all web-based applications. I work for a web development company, and we have made a huge transition: all websites are now entirely 100% ajax based and totally seamless, and the quality of our work has just blown us, and our clients away. It’ll change the web (and the desktop) forever and for the better. You’re way of thinking is typical for alot of people who are happy with old 90’s viewpoint of the web being a boring, undesireable bunch of static html.
All I’m saying is that about 90% of AJAX use fails to see the idea behind the techinque and what its major advantages are. What is better on a webpage that uses AJAX to switch body content? I know it won’t work on mobile devices that don’t support javascript, it won’t be bookmarkable (or it will be but the bookmark won’t work without javascript)… The list goes on.
I agree that AJAX is a great thing for web applications. But mostly not for web pages.
I, for the most part, agree with the first comment by Jackson. AJAX should only be used when it can be taken advantage of, however one must keep in mind the cons of using such an approach even when it’s appropriate to use AJAX. One of the obvious concerns is people can turn off javascript which can render your application useless if not taken into account. Another is right now the dominant browser is still IE6 which has a number of problems. Bottom line, AJAX does have potential but the comment by ego about “If I have to wait for the content I might as well see the whole screen redrawn – it’ll wake me up after the loading is done” is just nonsense.
dear someone – the comment goes to the content websites that use AJAX to change the content of the page which is utter and complete rubbish. there’s more than a few out there…
Sounds to me the title is named inappropriately. It should be named, “I Hate Stupid Web Developers” rather than AJAX. Having said this, you know what I hate about AJAX? All the damn code you need to produce for doing something that’s conceptually very simple!
Could be – I don’t hate the technique, I’ve been using it for quite some time. I hate what the AJAX hype did to the quality of websites. And I hate the fact that now every developer thinks he’s qualified to do dynamic web pages.
I share your feelings about the quantity of code, but I still haven’t found a decent small JavaScript style framework. I use YUI but I don’t know it intimately enough to make it a great experience.
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Nope, Ajax isn’t the future and it sure won’t be any “web standard” ever. REAL RIA technology like Adobe Flex and even Silverlight (heh) will be (and are already, i.e. Flex) better in almost every way. Ajax will be confined to minor simple web page updates, like ESPN scoreboards, as it should be. Works fine for that, but RIA? lol
Web-enabled *applications* will be true rich clients, not unreliable, slow, Javascript based hacks. Sorry, but that’s a pathetic vision of the future. A pessimistic future where the interweb still sucks, and provides the user with a crap experience more often than not. Is that really what we want the Internet to evolve to? Javascript hacks? roffle