Ajax: Mythic (Web) Hero

According to princeton.edu, Ajax is "a mythical Greek hero; a warrior who fought against Troy in the Iliad". While certainly an interesting story, most of you are probably more interested in the mythic (web) hero AJAX.

Lots of web developers, and even just regular internet users, have been hearing this term being thrown around. You probably even know that it stands for Asynchronous Javascript And XML. It is a way for specific content on a web page to be refreshed without the whole page having to be reloaded. This has the obvious benefits of saving both time and bandwidth. In fact, most sites have a small portion of content that changes between pages, with a larger amount being static. The Web 2.0, a revolutionizing of the internet that AJAX will be central player in, is another hot topic being widely discussed. AJAX may be cool, and revolutionary, but I think it will be a while before it brings about such drastic changes.

There are a lot of reasons why AJAX is good, and useful, however in some circles AJAX has embraced it a little too quickly. GMail was one of the first major uses of AJAX on the web. There are many great aspects to GMail, however, I contest that AJAX is the cause of one of the significant frustrations. Since AJAX refreshes information on a page without actually reloading the whole thing, navigation buttons are the first things to break. In addition, pages are impossible to bookmark and email to friends since your browser does not know the current state of the page. This brings back bad memories of browsing around sites built completely in flash. In short, this is a fairly major usability issue. Google has taken some time to try and fix this in GMail by patching the back button, but unfortunately the forward button seems to have been neglected.

While AJAX has the potential to revolutionize the web, I believe that more work is required for a seamless environment before more large scale systems are based on it. Perhaps browsers will soon start to track dynamic updates via Javascript, or maybe a serious effort will needed to change people's browsing habits. Until then, AJAX is a logical choice for smaller scale installations. There are numerous places where pop-up windows and selector screens can be replaced by small AJAX applications. This, most certainly, will help to improve usability, which is a good thing in anyone's book.