[thelist] AJAX Tip
Ian Anderson
ian at zstudio.co.uk
Wed Apr 5 16:42:06 CDT 2006
John Dowdell wrote:
> People mean both things by this term these days.
It's easy to understand why people get this mixed up. The whole point is
that you often can't see true AJAX working. It's the opposite of sexy.
-- geek to manager: "Wow, look, did you see that? The page didn't reload!"
-- manager: "Mmmm. Great!" (shuffles towards exit)
Coupled with the fact that as in the case of draggable sort order
widgets or Google maps, the AJAX part is usually physically - and very
visually - associated with cool UI tricks that are based on prototype.js
and similar DHTML effects.
Try showing your business types the draggable widgets which may
incidentally talk to the server asynchronously, and boy are they all
over you like a cheap suit. "When can we have this? We need slidey
things. Now."
I agree with Christian and others that we should not confuse ourselves
and others even more by calling things AJAX which are not, though.
What's needed is a sexy, Web 2.0 sort of name for the DHTML UI tricks -
I think these are actually really important going forward from here. The
real appeal of the new applications comes from the general leap in
usability they offer, which is partly due to the finer-grained
communication delivered by AJAX (or Flash) asynchronous server calls
without page refresh, and partly to the more intuitive, natural UI
conventions that are now reliable, mainstream, cross-browser techniques.
Yes, the latter are formally DHTML, but you don't want to be talking
about DHTML in this millennium. The term carries too much derogatory
baggage, in my opinion.
--
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