Ajax for the masses

This morning I came across an article accusing Swedish websites of being hopelessly outdated because they aren’t using exciting “new” technologies like Ajax. Nothing says modernity quite like declaring everything built six months ago obsolete.

There’s just one small problem: Ajax isn’t particularly new. The underlying technology has been around since 1998. What is new is the hype. The sudden realization that if you give an old collection of technologies a catchy name, people will start talking about it as if fire has just been discovered. As Jeffrey Zeldman recently put it, Ajax is essentially “web standards with a little Microsoft stuff thrown in”. Which raises an awkward question: why should a plain information site use Ajax at all?

Because it can? Because everyone else is doing it? Because somewhere a project manager has written “AJAX” on a PowerPoint slide? Not terribly convincing reasons.

There are also some less glamorous matters to consider, like usability and accessibility. Swedish public-service websites have generally come quite far in making their content accessible to people with disabilities and visitors using less mainstream platforms. That’s important. Vital information should remain available regardless of whether you’re using the latest browser on a shiny new computer or something held together with duct tape and stubbornness. Blindly pouring Ajax over every website like cheap hot sauce is a remarkably efficient way of undoing some of that work.

The article makes a great deal of web-based map services, and rightly so. Maps are one of those places where Ajax genuinely makes sense. Dragging a map around without waiting for an entire page to reload is clearly better. Nobody sane is campaigning for the return of the old click-wait-reload school of cartography.

But most websites aren’t maps. Before climbing aboard the Ajax express, perhaps it would be wise to examine the purpose of the site and the people actually using it. Radical stuff, I know.

Used properly, Ajax can be the cherry on top. The trick is remembering that you still need the cake underneath. And preferably understanding the difference between graceful degradation and progressive enhancement before you start decorating.

Ajax – now 10 percent more efficient than the competition.

There are some impressive examples using Ajax. Take the latest version of Windows Live Local. Microsoft stuffed a van with ten cameras and drove it through San Francisco and Seattle, capturing more than ten million images for each city. Switch to walk mode and you can virtually wander the streets of the Bay Area. Search for “Starbucks” and the coffee shops appear across the map, presumably ensuring that at no point in your virtual journey are you more than thirty meters from a sugar-filled latte.

Then there’s Gmail, where Ajax helps make a web application behave much more like a desktop application. Google Suggest uses it for autocomplete as you type, something I mentioned a couple of years ago, before somebody gave the technique a fashionable name and the industry collectively discovered religion.

These are good uses of Ajax because they improve the experience. That’s the important bit. Technology should serve the website, not the other way around. If Ajax makes something faster, clearer or easier to use, wonderful. Pour yourself a drink and celebrate. If it’s being added simply because somebody read an article saying Swedish websites aren’t sufficiently fashionable, perhaps leave the JavaScript alone and concentrate on making the site useful.

There will always be another shiny technology coming down the road, accompanied by breathless articles explaining that anyone not already using it is a hopeless relic. The trick is knowing when to get on the train. And when to remain comfortably seated at the bar.

Read more about the issue in Roger’s post Sveriges bästa webbplatser inte så bra, Ignorant Swedish tech hype by Robert Nyman, Webben är inte öppen för alla from Ny Teknik, or why not even the Computer Sweden article Offentliga webbplatser håller inte måttet.