1 How to not use it?

While I’m sure many people will love this article and use it for the Greater Good, I do feel uncomfortable reading anything regarding AJAX (except for the soccer club) where the author doesn’t explain that it is not meant to replace websites and large web applications.

Surely some of you visit Digg.com once every minute, and you may have noticed the overabundance of AJAX-related posts on that site. Some “cewl thingz” we’ve seen so far: An entire forum made up in AJAX and an entire weblog made up in AJAX. Cool huh? Think again: your back button doesn’t work, you have to click a text link instead. You can’t bookmark anything, no more “hey mom click this link for the latest news on IE7”.

People need to stop writing articles on how to use AJAX, people should start writing about how to NOT use AJAX.

posted at 07:33 am on March 07, 2006 by M. Hageman

2 Gmail

Once again, I think Gmail provides the clearest example of Ajax Done Right. The back button breaks most of the time, except when it’s most critical

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going back from a message to the inbox.

One really terrific way to learn the ways of the Ajax, in my opinion, is through working with the Google Maps API. It exposes a cross-browser Ajax object, plus it provides a cross-browser facility for crunching xslt. So even if innerHTML is fine in your book, you can do the “right thing” and transform raw data into a table node, and then attach it to your existing page. All without any hassle.

posted at 08:07 am on March 07, 2006 by Mike Purvis

3 Usability police

Hageman, if I had a nickel for every article, forum post, blog post, and website that waved the specter of Ajax usability woes in front of my face, the federal mints would have to start making more nickels. Fact is, every time someone so much as mentions the word Ajax, you can be guaranteed at least ten warnings like yours (keep an eye on this thread, for example).

Fact is, you’re always going to have people mucking up usability, and you’re always going to have people who care a great deal about usability. Some of the folks doing the “kewl stuff” are just hacks, but some of them are pioneers. You can’t make an omelette without breaking a few ova after all. I, for one, am happy to see an article that actually deals with a nuts and bolts problem rather than harping on usablilty once again.

posted at 09:40 am on March 07, 2006 by Crack Wilding

4 Accessibility?

Doesn’t this break the accessibility model? Isn’t that going to be the whole problem with AJAX is that it breaks all the rules of accessibility?

posted at 11:19 am on March 07, 2006 by Dean Collins

5 Untitled

I don’t mean to pick nits, but 12345 is the zip code for Schenectady, NY, not Anytown, NY. -)

posted at 03:21 pm on March 07, 2006 by Thomas J. Brown

6 The article is very good but there is a more simple way to work with ajax without the headache

Libraries such as Sajax provide all the benefits of ajax without handling the low-level. Simple callbacks are doing the work for you.

 was done in a few hours using this lib without prior ajax knowledge.

posted at 05:38 pm on March 07, 2006 by CoMagz founder

7 Good Excerpt - Suggestion

It was definitely a good excerpt from the book… however, I think the point has already been brought up that with the ‘craze’ that people have jumped on with Ajax, it is a safe idea to always include a way to make the code unobtrusive. The example, just by itself, entirely breaks without Javascript enabled and if someone is (as was mentioned by CoMags Founder) using a library for the scripts, they may be doing it for speed and convenience, not for accessibility. Granted, if you are making something grand-scale (ala Gmail), maybe (debateable) you can afford to require Javascript with no alternative way to get the content – but most sites don’t fit that mold.

posted at 12:33 am on March 08, 2006 by Nicole Hernandez

8 Untitled

>has been completely rewritten to reflect the best practices of the web standards world and is on shelves now

Not in the UK yet, unfortunately. But a great book, and I’m sure this edition will be worth getting.

posted at 01:42 am on March 08, 2006 by Tony Bittan

9 All well and good, but...

After staring at the same Valentine’s posts for seemingly an age, I was so excited to see an article on AJAX arrive. Always one to expand my knowledgebase this would be a good point to look into a new technology.

Then within 3 lines I read “nonstandard XMLHttpRequest()” and it’s put me off. IMHO with the drive of recent years to move towards standards and accessibility, to have the very core of this wonderful (new) technology based on a nonstandard device seems to be self-defeating. And with the references to breaking accessibility and the use of innerHTML (isn’t that IE only?) I really don’t think I’m going to bother now. This is really screaming “quick let’s use every fudge we can to make it work on every browser”, which is a mentality which annoyed me in ‘97 when it was all the rage, and I really hate it now.

I’ll keep my eyes open and come back to it in a few versions time when AJAX has matured and Microsoft stop pi**ing about and make IE work.

Unless somebody can convince me otherwise?

posted at 05:35 am on March 08, 2006 by Ross Clutterbuck

10 Re: Accessibility?

I subscribe to Dean’s view: AJAX is very often an accessibility-killer. One should use it cautious.

posted at 05:58 am on March 08, 2006 by Chris Leipold