Twilight Universe

There’s a lot of talk about AJAX right now. There’s also a lot of hype about it, and how it relates to remote scripting. I thought, having worked with it, I’d throw my two cents (or pence, to be more exact) into the ring.

There is something I want to make very clear:

Remote Scripting != AJAX. AJAX is Remote Scripting, but remote scripting has been around for quite a while. Long before AJAX was a gleam in the eye of buzzword using developers everywhere. Remote Scripting is a whole group of techniques, AJAX is just a sub-group.

AJAX stands for (according to the people that coined the term) “Asynchronous JavaScript + XML” or, to be more obvious: Asynchronous JavaScript And XML. Anything that doesn’t use the A, J or X is not, I repeat not AJAX. I didn’t think that was particularly hard to understand, I guess it must be. I can’t read a technology blog without running into comments or posts that snarkily mis-understand what it is, and then complain that they’ve been doing this since.. I don’t know, when IE5 was new, as if they get some kind of geek cred for it, rather than looking like annoying whiners.

Last week I released WordPress: Touched. It uses AJAX. Until Adaptive Path came along I would have just said it used XMLHttpRequest… but a buzzword is a buzzword and, lets face it, its easier to say, and sounds nicer.

What Touched does is grab an XHTML formatted page (from a php file, admitedly) and then submits data back to a different file and grabs the response. The XML here is the fact that XHTML must be formatted to XML rules (which, frankly, are bloody easy to code to, its the rest of the xhtml spec that people complain about). XMLhttpRequest is the simplest way of scripting an interactive web-application, in fact I don’t know of a way I’d rather do it. It is however not the only way. That is where the rest of remote scripting comes in — usually with an ugly bunch of IFRAME’s.

Its a valuable “technology” that really is no more a technology than the internet, or even the amorphous term “web” (how many times have you seen something that is “web-enabled” or some such marketing drivel). Then again computer chips are no more than a group of technologies. Just as rocket science is the art of controlling how you blow things up with science, AJAX is the technology that webpages can use to enable quicker, simpler web-applications. It works as a description for the most part, but isn’t totally accurate.

You know what? That’s fine. Stop arguing semantics and start developing content. Find ways to use this “new” “technology” in creative ways. Inline editing is probably the simplest use of it I can think of. Stop bickering about posible misuses, and use it correctly. JavaScript has been missused since day one. Two words: Pop-ups. If you don’t use things because of the way stupid people might missuse them we may as well stop using JavaScript, or any programing language, even e-mail — especially e-mail.

There are accesibiliy issues with AJAX, just as there is with any JavaScript, or for that matter with HTML, CSS, browsers, computers, and the modern keyboard. It is not about the thing itself; but how it is used. It is also about providing reasonable alternatives for important services.

I’ve seen the same incessant bitching about regular JavaScript, Flash, xhtml, css.. and every other gadget, gizmo and random gee-wizz-cool thing that turns up online. Sometimes people seem to find it easier to complain about something rather than use it. AJAX (in its many forms) is here to stay, now lets start to use it properly!