emconsteroids

I don’t exactly know but the AJAX Technology has become hugely popular amongst the so called Web 2.0 sites.

I think there is a big misconception going on here! Just because it’s possible and it works, it doesn’t necessarily make sense. In fact, in most of the cases, AJAX doesn’t make sense at all.

I believe that AJAX has become an absolute necessity on sites such as YouTube where you want to browse through the some of the site functionalities without interrupting the video playing. Let’s say you’re watching or listening to the Canon, you might want to browse through the comments at the same time without interrupting the video. This is where AJAX is the only possibility to do this effectively.

For anything else, AJAX is just an useless frill with no real benefit. In fact AJAX causes more problems than it solves:

• Search engines would not find contents
• Deep-Linking is not possible
• Some browsers still cause problems
• Most mobile devices don’t support AJAX
• The back button don’t work properly
• Accessibility is limited
• Analysis of user behavior is more difficult
• In-transparency in terms of SSL protocol usage

It may have some good sides such as:

• Enabling complex user interactivity (including drag & drop etc.)
• Reducing server load by modularizing the queries
• More client-side logic

However most of the time these features are not even used and the disadvantages outnumber the benefits by far. Or would you not agree?