On AJAX…

Dvorak’s commenting seems to be along the lines of complaining for the sake of complaining. Basically, we are on the front end of a new paradigm and there are issues. The same thing happened when the generally masses were able to create their own webpages. Places like Geocites were littered with seizure-inducing content. It’s not unlike the MySpace plague. Organizations took time to adjust as well but they had people thinking about what they produced which meant a quicker evolution to something palatable.

AJAX is mostly a design philosophy that is realized by various technologies. Before “AJAX” was first coined, the idea that websites could behave more like applications and less like a collection of static pages had been around. Java applets and Flash were the original AJAX. Both approaches were rather heavy but have their utility. I doubt either will disappear soon. AJAX is about improving the user experience, making it smoother and richer. It’s unfortunate that the term and the realization of it via JavaScript and XML have been bound.

Dvorak is really commenting on bad designs and bad implementations.

The other element that is pretty much ignored in his discussion is the impact of new web design standards have on sites. The thrust to separate structure from format has been troubled by inconsistencies in the interpretations of primary formatting language: CSS. Browsers don’t always faithfully implement the CSS standard. I haven’t thought about it enough but my guess is that every browser has a flaw. If you haven’t had to make a webpage of any significant complexity look the same in two different browsers you are missing out on a good deal of fun.

Creating pages that scale well isn’t easy. In fact, I’m not sure it even makes sense. Why should the same page be viewable on all types of machines? Accessbility is important but this suggests that the web throttle itself to the greatest common divisior which doesn’t particularly enable us to make the best use of the resource.