Slashdot Mirror
Ajax Sucks Most of the Time
Vo0k writes "It seems that everyone is excited with what AJAX promises, and only few look at what it breaks as well. The article at Usability Views offers a critical view at the new Microsoft technology, pointing out some problems it creates, like breaking bookmarking, making the 'back' button useless, problems with printing, accessiblity and more. The single-sided view from the article provides a good counter-balance for all the craze."
I wouldn't necessarily say AJAX sucks, but I've foudn that Tide does, indeed, do a better job...
...to cook them via the upcoming flame war.
You can misuse ANY technology to f things up.
This is the Internet. You can say "fuck" here.
...it totally blows.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
To paraphrase Karl Marx: History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as XML.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
AJAX is MS technology...Oh, my God. I need to start hating this now. I better hide behind this article and bash Microsoft. Don't waste a second!
The web is used (rightly or wrongly) to deliver two distinct things.
1) Porn
2) Spam
This is the Internet. You can say "fuck" here.
Yeah. Especially when responding to an article headlined "AJAX sucks..."
It would be nice to be sure of anything the way some people are of everything.
This is the Internet. You can say "fuck" here.
I believe the correct terminology on the internet is "fsck".
What the heck do you think you're doing reading the entire thing? This is /. You're supposed to not read it or just read the first couple of paragraphs and then come back here and try and sound like a pundit.
That being said, I fear that many will read that article and take it quite seriously. It always amazes the luddite stances that technologists seem to adopt about their technology.
"This is a spoof article. Please compare it with the original and you will see how little it has been changed."
:-)
He didn't even change the indefinite article in the graphic--"This is a Ajax free site" [emphasis added]
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
You can also say "flbgrtyu", but why would you want to?
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
It looks like a duck.. It quacks like a duck... It's not that insurance company... it's AFLAX... http://www.aflax.org/
Ajax was never as good as Achilles!
I put the 't' in electrical engineering.
...and AFAIK I've never seen it, but I would hate it if I went there.
You've obviously won some awards - Nielson (or is it Tog?) says that if your page wins awards, you're throwing 10% of your readers away.
There is an old and simple design principle that applies to everything from web pages to electric drills: KISS, or Keep It Simple, Stupid". As Scotty said in Star Treck III, "The more complex the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain."
The statement that makes me sure you really, really suck at web development that stuck out like a sore thimb: "Websites are designed for a minimum of 800x600 these days, if not 1024 wide."
Hope no geezers go to your site(s), because many if not most of them have two problems: bad eyesight and old monitors. Mix the two and you'll have a 12 inch monitor set to 640x480 that they have a hard time reading with glasses.
Only total incompetents make a page non-resizeable. Your page should look as good on WebTV as it does in a giant 1024 (or larger) monitor, and vice versa. Screens come in all sizes and resolutions, and if you don't realize this you have a lot of learning in front of you.
"The best use of AJAX, that I see, is with improving user interactivity with a web application."
This is actually a good use. However, how many web applications do you use? I only use one; my registrar's site. It's barely useable (has a horizontal scroll at 800x600, for example). How many do you use?
"The author talks about how 'the page' is the basic idea that was behind the Web. Well, I hate to break it to him, but after 12+ years, things have evolved."
Sure, now we have IM, Napster, streaming audio, etc. BUt the basic usint is still the page. Ever been to Google? Does it list "billions of web applications?" No, it lsts PAGES. Like, for example, the page you are reading right now.
Most web surfing is done in pages to this day and that will likely remain the case for a long, long time.
"The notion of the page has long since been an area of limitation with web applications and usability."
No, it hasn't. In fact, the opposite is true.
"Users don't like having to wait for a full page load to make a small request within an application."
True. But HTML Pages usually serve very quickly, while (eg) ASP database pages take forever to load. And pages written in AJAX (and even CSS) take forever to load.
"I am conscious that search engines can't necessarily index my content... so what!"
If you don't want or need your content indexed, then that's a valid point. However, most folks actually want a few visitors to their sites.
"Old browsers are likely unpatched browsers. With the vulnerabilities and security issues today, compatibility with AJAX is the least of their problems. Upgrade!"
No way most users will. Instead, they will simply stop buying stuff on the web or keeping sensitive stuff on their PC because they know that the black hats are going to exploit them as soon as a hole is found. Most users don't give a rat's ass about security. That is the reality - deal with it. They're not going to "upgrade their browsers" to visit your ineptly coded page when your competetition works fine in any old browser.
Too many times I've seen static content served up with an ASP at teh end of the uRL. I think of statements like yours when I see this, and shake my head in disbelief at how incompetent most web designers are.