AJAX Misused
I was approached by a friend who was so proud to announce that they use a lot of AJAX in their projects and asked if I ever tried a single AJAX Code. “Do you know AJAX?”, he asked.
“Well, I don’t need AJAX in any of my applications.”, I said matter of factly, implicitly suggesting my little knowledge on the subject . ”Tell me what do you use AJAX for?”
“It was really cool.”, he replied. “Go check out our company website. I made the whole thing in AJAX. Notice carefully how the content changes as you click on the sidebar navigation links. ONLY the content changes without reloading the entire page altogether.”
I don’t believe it was very cool, but a week after, I visited their website. The website was very cool indeed with all the nice graphics and the beautiful color combination. Except for one thing: The whole AJAX exhibition could be easily accomplished with the IFRAME Tag.
I think it was a total waste of time using AJAX that way. Plus, it doesn’t benefit the website or improve the user-experience. This is one area where I see AJAX being misused by an enthusiatic web developer. I suspect my friend decided to use AJAX in their website just because he thinks it is cool and wants to try it out.
alert(’this is not ajax, jst a simple javascript’)
Hi Donald,
Thanks for dropping by.
And yes, it’s just JavaScript indeed. What surprises me is that some programmers would go the AJAX route (JS + Server-side script) what can be accomplished by a simple client-side script. And this topic by the way is based on a real website I’ve seen — a corporate website of a Web Development company.
Have you tried telling that to your friend? Haha.