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The Future of AJAX and the Rich Web
jg21 writes "This AJAXWorld Magazine article indicates how far AJAX has come since devs complained here two years ago that it sucked all the time. Eight experts were asked what questions we should now all be asking about where AJAX is headed next. The suggested questions are refreshingly hard-headed, including: 'How are we to fix the web?'; 'When will AJAX development finally be easy?'; and 'Do we really need JavaScript 2.0? Won't it be somewhat irrelevant by the time it becomes commonplace and thus usable?' One of the most interesting questions came from Kevin Hakman, co-founder of TIBCO's General Interface: 'On what timeline will AJAX skills become commoditized like HTML skills became?'"
A div is just a non-semantic block (just like a span is a non-semantic inline bit, though of course either of those could be changed by CSS). A table is very specific. Semantically, only tabular data should go into a table, and thus tables are completely wrong for layout. Divs, on the other hand, do make sense. For example, you're building a page with two columns, perhaps for a nav sidebar and a main content area. You have two separate components to your page, but they don't have any semantic meaning other than being blocks to put stuff (that is, they're not tabular data, list data, paragraphs, headings, etc). In that case, a div (short for "division", as in "page division" or something logically separate from other bits on the page) is absolutely correct to use. So now you have two divs on your page, one for the sidebar and one for the content. Using CSS, you can make these look however you like. Put the sidebar on the left or right, it doesn't matter (can't do that with a table without editing content). Put the "sidebar" along the top or bottom of the content area (can't do that with a table without editing content, either). Obviously that's CSS's doing, but you need something to work with in order to style appropriately. Within the sidebar, you have semantic data, as nav data can be considered a list. Within the content division, you have semantic data consisting of paragraphs, headings, etc. If you modelled your page as a table with a single row, with the sidebar being one cell and the content being another cell, your page is not semantic. Modelling it with divs, it is.
Divs can definitely be over-used. There are a lot of specific layouts that require wrappers and such, which usually means using divs. While you can avoid much of that, there's still some tag soup required if you want specific layouts with today's browsers, and you just have to deal with the fact that reality is intruding on your perfect little world. For my part, I would much rather have two divs wrapped in a third in order to do a two-column page layout than have a single table with columns as cells in the table.
You just can't say it any better than that.
From a lot of the comments I get the impression that most people really don't get it. AJAX is incredibly useful, but it's mostly a really clever hack. The need for dynamically updating elements on the web page is definitely there, and AJAX manages to fill that need somewhat. But Javascript/DOM + XML/HTML is a terrible set of tools to build GUI widgets with.
AJAX works by sweeping the nitty-gritty details under the rug, but scratch the surface, and you realize how filthy the whole thing is. The first time you try to use a cool feature of your favorite GUI widget, and expect it to work the way your favorite desktop widget does, the cool-factor quickly degrades into frustration. Even with some of the best libraries out there, they still don't seem to have the problem licked.
It's amazing how far we have gotten with the tools available, but there really is a threshold forming due to these weaknesses. I'm not smart enough to envision how to get there, but there really needs to be a fundamental change that better integrates these technologies. Otherwise we're gonna be in spaghetti-code hell for a quite some time to come.