Is AJAX On The Way Out? | Hacker News Reader

Is AJAX On The Way Out?

mappingtheweb.com

14 pointsedw51927 comments

Awful, egregriously bad article. Beyond wanting to tear my hair out from the prose itself, it doesn't provide any proof to support its central thesis. "The frenzied days of web 2.0 are over", "others believe this technology is on its way out." Citation, please? If you just pull something out of your ass, say so; otherwise provide some evidence for your conclusion. Is it worth pointing out that the principal reason the author gives for AJAX being on the "way out" is that developers misuse it? Boy, that sure hasn't stopped HTML, Flash, Javascript, CSS...

Ugh. How did this make the front page again?

"No", indeed.

I was thinking basically the same thing. If I'd submitted an essay like that at college, it would have come back dripping with comments like "please justify", "what exactly is your argument?" and that old favourite "you need to develop your ideas".

Also, this: "The user doesn’t care about sophisticated interface features. Locating the desired information is the primary focus." I do care very much about sophisticated interfaces, maybe the author meant "interface bling"? I suspect, in fact, that is what was meant -- fancy but pointless DOM effects are on their way out. We can always hope.

I thought it might be a good article, but then it ended right after the introduction where I thought the actual content of the argument would arrive.

There's a lot of UI terrain we haven't explored yet, and AJAX makes more of that terrain reachable. It seems silly to suggest it's on its way out just because it's no longer the cool new thing.

This first sentence comment by itself is more informative and interesting than the entire "article" under discussion.

I'm honestly a little stunned by the stagnancy of innovation in online interfaces. It's way beyond just laziness or hewing to trends -- it's virtually a total refusal to believe that we can do better. One of my goals right now is to develop ideas (that is, UI setups) that question some of our fundamental notions about what interacting with a website is supposed to look and feel like.

Looks like you have been working on your points to syllables ratio ;)

Not quite. Points per character. "No" is 50% more efficient that "lol".

> "No" is ... more efficient that "lol"

Not if we count unique chars.

Sorry. "No" is 50% more efficient than "wtf".

You forget that you had to press "shift" to type "N". The number of key presses are the same ;-)

lol

To bluntly say no suggests you're passionate on the topic and therefore not objective. The author suggests that ajax has it's uses but the abuses of ajax are what's on the way out.

"My quarrel lies in the fact that many web designers and developers choose to <strike>abuse</strike> overuse this technology to the point of stupidity."

The article complains about overuse, overuse is the opposite to "on the way out", so "No" is the correct answer to the question in the title.

Your first point is more interesting to me though. You say that he is "passionate" and therefore not "objective", to imply that we shouldn't listen to him. That idea worries me. I want to hear from people who are passionate, who care about what they are talking about. Thought experiment: if "only ambivalent people may have an opinion" and ambivalent people can't be bothered to have opinions, how many opinions will we be left with?

My point was more that he dismissed the viewpoint right away because it disagreed with something he was passionate about. I still think "no" is the wrong answer because both of you are responding to a question the article doesn't propose. The title was an eye-catcher. The article was about the hype dissipating.

And of course, because I'm not super enthusiastic my post is downmodded. The community on YC is alarmingly sensitive...

AJAX, like Flash is a tool. Back in 2002-2004 everyone thought Flash would take over the web. I got resumes/applications from designers who 'only' did Flash and tried to convince me it was the future. Fast forward to today and Flash remains a very important "tool" but only a tool and not the answer to all our woes. AXAX is now just another tool in my virtual toolbelt, one I use from time to time, but not something I'd base my entire site on (hmmm kind of like javascript was in the late 90's early 00's)

With pretty much every creative endeavor, taste dictates the results. When used taste and as needed, AJAX can provide great functionality. It's not going anywhere.

The headline is just fishing for clicks.

My suggestion would be to change the title to: How not to write an Essay.

It's one of the lamest articles to make the hacker news front page in ages.

This article has nothing to do with its title. In any case, the question practically answers itself. Just look at what people are using.

The author clearly does not know what "ajax" is. It may be a misnomer and a buzzword, but what it means is something substantial.

This article is so, so bad.

AJAX may be on the way out, if only that people are more interested in AJSONC (asynchronous javascript object notation with callbacks). Most people have realized that any code that writes XML from internal data structures can easily write JSON, which is more useful if you're using Javascript and not exchanging hierarchical data structures.

If anything, tools like GWT will enable a whole new level of AJAX powered web interfaces.

Yes. Or at least I hope so. I think it's convoluted, cumbersome and an embarrassment. We can do better.

I don't get the hate. Sure a lot of web apps abuse the hell out of it but there's some wonderful things done with Ajax. Google Maps, Meebo are two of the most well known. Gmail does some cool things with Ajax as well

As far as I can tell, the convoluted and cumbersome parts of AJAX spawn from two directions:

Differences in browser implementation (so we have some boilerplate to figure out what we actually need to do to make an XMLHTTPRequest) - which is getting better, and really isn't that much of a pain, and the nature of the web itself, or rather the nature of HTTP - namely that it's stateless, and we're doing more and more that relies on hacks around the stateless nature of HTTP.

Getting around that second one pretty much requires an entirely new protocol, unless you're the type that doesn't think that the web should be used for more interactive things, in which case the only thing I can say is "too bad, it is and there's nothing you can do to stop it".

Apologies if I've tangented in the wrong directions. Maybe you would like to present some reasons as to why you think AJAX is convoluted, cumbersome, and an embarrassment?

To answer the question you first need to define AJAX. What's your own definition, and why do you consider that convoluted and combersome?

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