So now it finally has a name?
Sunday, April 3, 2005Thanks to Jessie James Garrett of Stop Design (' Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications') we now have a new buzzword: Ajax. This approach to building websites and webapps that so many people have been using for years now but have not been able to wrap it up into a single unified form when trying to explain it to clients, peers, house pets, whoever will listen...
Of course it wasn't Mr Garrett who popularised the technique, only attempted to name it. It's been placed in the webdev spotlight because Google have adopted it as their software delivery platform of choice. Even though there have been many websites promoting it and offering free code for, literally, years.
DHTML and CSS have been getting a bad rap
With the rise of the 'rich client' in the last few years the 'Ajax' crowd have been on the back foot. I have been one of them. Although we didn't coin a word like 'Ajax', only a vague notion of somehow using HTML + Javascript + CSS to make a spiffy webpage. You know like a normal webpage but not so static.
The 'rich client' mob have predicted the end of the browser and the rise of much cooler stuff. It's not so surprising that the endorsements for rich client technology come from the software makers themselves, Macromedia, Microsoft, Sun, IBM. Software like Flash, Java, ActiveX, XAML is all meant to make the browser redundant. And a lot of developers and designers have hitched their wagons to the rich client train for various reasons and DHTML and CSS have been getting a bad rap from these people:
- Browser incompatibility minefield
- Not a simple job to make it work , there's no IDE
- Documentation is lacking
- The platform is fragmented
- Lack of media/display capabilities (visual scaling/sound etc)
There's something about the DHTML+CSS approach that just feels right
But although these arguments have validity, there's something about the DHTML+CSS approach that just feels right. It's not easy to describe, but when you look at projects like the CSS Zen Garden you just want to take the dissenters by the ears and say "Can't you see why this is cool!?!?!?"
- Software delivery has never been easier
- No financial investement in any platform/software required on either side of publishing
- It's all plain text
- Stylesheet switching!
- UI Degradability, it's not "all or nothing"
- Maintains standard browser behaviour: printing, navigation, right-click-open-in-new-window
- Delivery to different devices is a no-brainer
- Webservers and browsers are built for it, indeed the whole web is built for it from top to bottom.
- Websites are websites: hyperlinks, the URI, selectable text, searchable text
- The time investment to learn to do it this way is about the same
New buzzword = endorsement
So the DHTML crowd are collectively groaning about the new buzzword for something they've been doing for ages. But I'm thinking perhaps it's a good thing for the development community. We have endorsement by a huge internet company and now an encompassing name from a well respected designer that the uninitiated can chew on. Perhaps these things will only mean more acceptance.
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