I’ve had a play with AJAX as I understand it, which is basically being able to query the server and update only sections of a page instead of refreshing the entire page.
I don’t believe field validation and help tips on the client can be considered an AJAX trick, while it might look pretty javascript could always do that and it’s nothing new.
I used it to put dynamically refreshed ‘top’ output from the server into a section of a static page, the server side done in a simple bash shell script. Hmm, it probably does have a future in intranet sites, not on the internet surely ?.
Why not on the internet? you ask, I’d say because of the relience on code executing in the web browser. Most of the AJAX examples I’ve seen use javascript in the web page to provide the AJAX client side code.
The problem with that is like any sensible firefox user I use noscript and deny any public site I visit, if a public site required javascript turned on then I never return to that site.
The same for sites with flash menus, I also use flashblock; if a site requires flash navigation I never go back to it.
For that reason my website is coded to require no javascript functions if at all possible, I want sensible people like me to be able to use it with javascript turned off. And I don’t want to have big blocks of script/noscript throughout the site either, I just want to maintain one look. Anyone on the internet that allows code to run in their browser is just asking for trouble.
Of course on a trusted intranet it could presumably be assumed safe. So AJAX applications probably have a great future inside large organisations.
But on the public internet ?, noscript and flashblock are part of my armoury; many people probably just disable javascript in the browser global options.
So the flashy sites that make extensive use of javascript are only ever likely to be visited by those that haven’t realised the internet is a dangerous place yet; who unfortunately will start to take such things as predictive lookups from serverside databases as they type into text fields as the norm and complain that it doesn’t work if they turn off javascript in their browsers; so any site that implements fantastic AJAX functionality right at the start is going to be stuck with it or lots of complaints if it gets turned off later (or if a coding error creeps into the web pages served that breaks the functionality, ajax adds another point of failure I think).
I think everyone does agree that AJAX is supposed to be helping make web applications look exactly like PC applications, but hasn’t thin client been tried before ?.
Certainly some social network sites make extensive use of it. But why ?, way back in the dark ages of dial up being able to reload only the section of the page you were looking at would have been a help, but most people have broadband now so why not just reload the whole page and suffer a subsecond response difference ?. Ah, of course, developers must use all the latest software tricks (hmm, that includes me).
I guess in summary I don’t think javascript should be trusted on internet served webpages, it’s not like they can be signed like applets ot active-x controls so web pages with javascript (or flash) must be considered untrusted.
And the thought for the evening. All the browser makers working hard to get web browsers to run in sandboxes to prevent damage to the client PC from code serverd from webpages. How many man-hours of development has that chewed up, simply because allow javascript to run is the default in most browsers and users have to manually turn javascript off if they feel the need.
The internet would be a lot safer place if all browsers by default disabled javascript/applets/active-x etc and required users to whitelist the sites they trusted (as is done in most browsers now with SSL certificates).
But no, all vendors, even opensource ones, need the upgrade path between releases to be as transparent as possible to the users; so unsafe defaults will be rolled out for a long time yet. And if they rolled out with safe defaults (like javascript and flash disabled by default) then all those AJAX driven sites would be flooded with user complaints until the help desks told them how to whitelist their sites.
And I did’nt even mention the additional load on the website server from all those dynamic requests.
I will leave playing with it alone for now, and some of the world may pass me by; not the part of the world wise enough to use noscript and flashblock though.
