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The Future of AJAX and the Rich Web
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Dec 11, 2007 03:20 PM
from the question-is-worth-1000-answers dept.
from the question-is-worth-1000-answers dept.
jg21 writes "This AJAXWorld Magazine article indicates how far AJAX has come since devs complained here two years ago that it sucked all the time. Eight experts were asked what questions we should now all be asking about where AJAX is headed next. The suggested questions are refreshingly hard-headed, including: 'How are we to fix the web?'; 'When will AJAX development finally be easy?'; and 'Do we really need JavaScript 2.0? Won't it be somewhat irrelevant by the time it becomes commonplace and thus usable?' One of the most interesting questions came from Kevin Hakman, co-founder of TIBCO's General Interface: 'On what timeline will AJAX skills become commoditized like HTML skills became?'"
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Ajax Sucks Most of the Time 510 comments
Vo0k writes "It seems that everyone is excited with what AJAX promises, and only few look at what it breaks as well. The article at Usability Views offers a critical view at the new Microsoft technology, pointing out some problems it creates, like breaking bookmarking, making the 'back' button useless, problems with printing, accessiblity and more. The single-sided view from the article provides a good counter-balance for all the craze."
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will AJAX development finally be easy? (Score:3, Interesting)
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Re:will AJAX development finally be easy? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:will AJAX development finally be easy? (Score:4, Informative)
As someone else pointed out, XMLHTTPRequest is what makes AJAX tick. But without knowing Javascript, what are you gonna do with it?
Assuming you are very good with javascript, here are two resources for you. 1 will help you see what the XMLHTTPRequest object does. 2 will help you tame it a bit and abstract things.
[1]: http://w3schools.com/ajax/default.asp [w3schools.com]
[2]: http://www.prototypejs.org/learn [prototypejs.org]
The thing is, the AJAX bit is a very small part of the total AJAX package. Then you'll need to learn JSON (a good data interexchange format) and how to use Javascript to create elements.
There, now that I have provided what you asked for and not just some smart alek remark about how you need to google it, this has to be said...If you seriously expect to master a useful skill in an afternoon, then you have some expectation issues. If there's one thing life has taught me, it's that something worth having doesn't come in a day, and if it does come in a day, it's probably not worth much. Did you learn to program in one day? No? Then why would you expect to learn a complex object and a totally new technique for making web applications on one day? But if you really want to learn then you'll thank me for those links later when your web development reaches the next level. If you are just bashing AJAX with a cudgel of ignorance, then you'll ignore those links and keep griping about AJAX being too hard. I guess time will tell.
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Re:will AJAX development finally be easy? (Score:5, Informative)
For a quick, but useful and accurate, starting point I like Mozilla's introduction [mozilla.org].
Then I recommend downloading and trying prototype [prototypejs.org]. It saves the mundane tasks, makes code a little easier to read, and is used by other popular frameworks.
Those cover the base scenarios. I haven't seen any good intermediate documentation. After the intros I suggest reading more reference documentation and just trying things out.
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Re:will AJAX development finally be easy? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Not using it.
Re:will AJAX development finally be easy? (Score:5, Insightful)
Assuming you start from zero...
The beginnings are easy. Learn basics of HTML and CSS. A week and you're intermediate. You still don't know all the hacks and caveats but you know quite enough.
Learn basics of Javascript. Say, 3 days. Simple JS is easy. If you think all JS is easy, read some scripts by Douglas Crockford and see how wrong you were. But for a starter, you need simple JS.
Then learn using DOM. This isn't all that hard. There are some caveats like some browsers inserting whitespace text nodes between tags and such, but that's all doable. One evening to master it.
Learn some backend language. PHP probably. With some database too. Quite easy but the amount of knowledge you need to absorb is at least 2 weeks of learning.
Next you learn basics of using xmlHttpRequest. This is one evening and you know how it works and you know there's no sense using it as-is.
You spend the next afternoon picking an AJAX framework/library/toolbox and another day learning it.
They you spend another year writing AJAX and learning how to properly react to unreliable connections and handle all kinds of errors, corrupted data, browser incompatibilities, how to protect your apps from script injection attacks or exploiting your application server by someone "from outside", deal with load ballancing on the server side, sharing scripts between domains, making the code non-conflicting with other JS and self (2 instances of the same AJAX-based tool on one page? It's broken more often than you think!), creating javascript files dynamically using PHP to allow better flexiblity of your app, parsing, traversing, modifying and extracting data from style sheets, interacting with Flash, Java and APIs of a dozen external services, writing XUL based apps, optimizing data for transfer, porting large parts of business logic to JS to offload your application servers, then finally using the advanced javascript where modifying system methods and objects is not a taboo anymore.
Then you know AJAX.
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Whoa, hey, full stop. I was with you until then, but... You're really trusting your business logic to the least controlled (both in the "security" and "standardized" sense) part of the stack? Ouch. Good luck, man.
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<div style="width:40pt;height:40px;border:solid;">
<img src="foo.png" style="width:50%;height:50%;"
</div>
That displayed the image correctly in Firefox and IE6, the
Re:will AJAX development finally be easy? (Score:5, Informative)
From a lot of the comments I get the impression that most people really don't get it. AJAX is incredibly useful, but it's mostly a really clever hack. The need for dynamically updating elements on the web page is definitely there, and AJAX manages to fill that need somewhat. But Javascript/DOM + XML/HTML is a terrible set of tools to build GUI widgets with.
AJAX works by sweeping the nitty-gritty details under the rug, but scratch the surface, and you realize how filthy the whole thing is. The first time you try to use a cool feature of your favorite GUI widget, and expect it to work the way your favorite desktop widget does, the cool-factor quickly degrades into frustration. Even with some of the best libraries out there, they still don't seem to have the problem licked.
It's amazing how far we have gotten with the tools available, but there really is a threshold forming due to these weaknesses. I'm not smart enough to envision how to get there, but there really needs to be a fundamental change that better integrates these technologies. Otherwise we're gonna be in spaghetti-code hell for a quite some time to come.
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Reduce the Quirks and Exceptions to HTML/CSS (Score:4, Insightful)
HTML skills are a commodity? (Score:4, Insightful)
It seems to me that developers that can write decent HTML are still an extreme minority. I still see href="javascript:", "<div> s are better than tables for layout", a chronic amount of invalid code, and all kinds of other idiocy all the time. Sure, if you want monkeys to throw tag soup all over the place it's not hard to find them, but that doesn't mean they know what they are doing or that it's easy to find people who actually understand HTML.
Re:HTML skills are a commodity? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:HTML skills are a commodity? (Score:5, Insightful)
Add an event handler to a normal <a> element with a proper href attribute. It works when JavaScript is switched off, it works when your event handler has an error, it works when you try to open something in a new tab or window, it works when the browser doesn't support whatever it is you are trying to do in your event handler, it just plain works.
No, they aren't. They are absolutely useless for layout.
You have confused the <div> element type with CSS. They are totally different things.
This is not pedantry. If you are thinking that layout is somehow achieved with <div> elements, then you are looking at things completely upside-down. You use the most appropriate element type for the information at hand, whether that's a table, a list, a paragraph, or whatever. You then arrange those elements with CSS. The particular element types you've used are not relevant to the layout. If you think <div> elements are in any way interesting for layout purposes, then you don't understand how the whole picture fits together.
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Re:HTML skills are a commodity? (Score:5, Informative)
A div is just a non-semantic block (just like a span is a non-semantic inline bit, though of course either of those could be changed by CSS). A table is very specific. Semantically, only tabular data should go into a table, and thus tables are completely wrong for layout. Divs, on the other hand, do make sense. For example, you're building a page with two columns, perhaps for a nav sidebar and a main content area. You have two separate components to your page, but they don't have any semantic meaning other than being blocks to put stuff (that is, they're not tabular data, list data, paragraphs, headings, etc). In that case, a div (short for "division", as in "page division" or something logically separate from other bits on the page) is absolutely correct to use. So now you have two divs on your page, one for the sidebar and one for the content. Using CSS, you can make these look however you like. Put the sidebar on the left or right, it doesn't matter (can't do that with a table without editing content). Put the "sidebar" along the top or bottom of the content area (can't do that with a table without editing content, either). Obviously that's CSS's doing, but you need something to work with in order to style appropriately. Within the sidebar, you have semantic data, as nav data can be considered a list. Within the content division, you have semantic data consisting of paragraphs, headings, etc. If you modelled your page as a table with a single row, with the sidebar being one cell and the content being another cell, your page is not semantic. Modelling it with divs, it is.
Divs can definitely be over-used. There are a lot of specific layouts that require wrappers and such, which usually means using divs. While you can avoid much of that, there's still some tag soup required if you want specific layouts with today's browsers, and you just have to deal with the fact that reality is intruding on your perfect little world. For my part, I would much rather have two divs wrapped in a third in order to do a two-column page layout than have a single table with columns as cells in the table.
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I would prefer to write semantic code, but there's just too many bizarre design decisions made in the development of CSS and the float model, a
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No, it's not pedantry. This isn't merely a case of wrong terminology, it's a sign that a developer is looking at something in a completely upside-down way.
"Div layouts" is not easier to understand than "CSS layouts".
If you tell people to replace layout tables with
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Did you read past the first few words? I gave examples of opening links in a new tab or window. This is a problem for javascript: links regardless of whether Javascript is switched on or off.
In any case, why is the ability to work with JavaScript disabled a moot point just because Ajax is used? Just because you use Ajax, it doesn't mean that you need to give up on situ
Re:HTML skills are a commodity? (Score:5, Insightful)
I used to be on the side of using semantically neutral elements like divs and css to specify layout.
Most layouts work fine with semantically neutral elements (divs). Some don't. I have used tables for layout in one or two cases, but not before trying VERY hard to make a purely CSS driven solution. To approximate it using no tables, I'd have to put javascript in my CSS expressions to make IE simulate min-width and min-height, among other things. Since that's a clever but ultimately sucky solution, tables won out. We're talking very specific layouts here. Usually you shouldn't need tables.
I said it in another nearby post, but I'll say it again here: being a professional is knowing the rules. Another part of being a professional is knowing when to break them. Yes, using tables for layout is a semantic faux-pas. But sometimes it makes the most sense.
If you find yourself having to cobble together a collections of hacks to make a certain layout work without tables, then you either need to abandon the layout, or if you cannot, use tables. Semantically incorrect, but it's better than some of the hacks that you have to use to work around browser (IE) flakiness. I am not talking about wrapping floating divs in a container with negative margins. That's a pretty elegant solution. I am talking about several layers of nested divs with wacky CSS tricks and IE hacks on top of Javascript magic. That stuff is ridiculous. In short, use the best tool for the job and get over your prejudices about a certain design methodology being "bad".
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Looking at your website I see you're using divs and spans in
marchitecture alert (Score:5, Insightful)
I claim first serious post.
Most of these questions appear to me to be either leading questions, whose intent is to foment desire in the questioners product(s) and/or service(s), or marketing questions.
Some of the questions are legit, however. For example, those questions concerning security, performance, unit testing, and analytics.
With regards to the question about which framework to choose, I have posted my favorites here [transitionchoices.com].
the suck/non-suck divide (Score:5, Informative)
I think one sign of this difficulty is that just about all AJAX libraries do the exact same thing. The same basic special effects, field additions, etc. The fact that none of the libraries go beyond these, points to what's hard to do.
Javascript isn't a great language. It's not robust, and it's difficult to really do good architecture with libraries using it. HTML is a pretty decent method to mark up text, but wasn't meant originally to ever be interactive.
Tying together a hacked together language with HTML doesn't make for the greatest programming experience. Especially compared to any real GUI framework.
Maybe most people don't want/need a real GUI framework, and AJAX covers all the bases for them -- in which you're probably going to say you like AJAX.
However, I suspect if AJAX and HTML were really so great/powerful/easy, many people would have stopped using flash already. I have no love for flash, but it can do things much more easily/faster than AJAX can for many tasks (disliking both technologies I'm pretty non-biased here).
What I would love to see is a standard *real* GUI for the web that is non-language dependent (i.e. whatever scripting language you prefer you can use). I'd even use something like Jython with newer/better GUI libraries. But we really need something written from the ground up with GUI in mind.
Re:the suck/non-suck divide (Score:5, Interesting)
Once you understand it, Javascript is an awesome language. It's C/C++/Java-like syntax hides its fundamentally functional underpinnings. The core datastructure in Javascript is a method. Everything can be represented in terms of methods, even to the point of not using any variables. With that in mind, it's a very powerful language that is often maligned precisely because of what it is -- many people just don't "get" functional languages (why C/C++/Java/etc are so popular and Lisp/ML/Haskell/etc are not), though you can certainly write procedural or even OO code in Javascript. It's also very easy to shoot yourself in the foot with Javascript, depending on implementations (using anonymous methods is a good way to leak memory in IE if you're not careful, for example).
As a scripting language, Javascript has a lot too offer. Too bad it's been forever tied to HTML and web stuff.
People like Flash because it gives you lots of pretty, shiney bits for very little work. It's also vector-based, so you can build a pixel-perfect layout like so many bad web designers want ("Our web site must look exactly like our magazine"). Too many people associate "AJAX" with flashy Web 2.0-y visual effects (fading highlights, rounded corners, wet reflections, large fonts, etc), when AJAX is really about communication. If all you care about is glitz, go ahead and use Flash. If you want to build something that actually works well, I'd go with javascript+HTML.
You may not want to hear it, but Microsoft has much of that with ASP.Net AJAX [asp.net], as have others like Script# [nikhilk.net]. In each case, you're writing most (or all, in the case of Script#) of your code in a .NET langauge and the compiler handles generating the javascript appropriate for your target browser(s). These work with at least Firefox and IE, and should also work with Safari, Opera, and others with minor tweaking.
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when will AJAX skills become commoditized? (Score:5, Insightful)
Easy: when a WYSIWYG editor, a la Dreamweaver, can accomplish all basic AJAX functionality without having to mess with much, if any, code.
Yeah - sure - Dreamweaver is suboptimal, but for 95% of what you need in a site (and if your site is fairly simple, 100%) it does the job, just fine, and you don't need to mess with that messy HTML and javascripty goopety glop. you just treat it like InDesign or Quark, and design your page - no muss, no fuss, nothing too fancy.
When Dreamweaver (or some similar app yet-to-be-developed) can do Exactly That - let me do AJAX without touching code, then you know AJAX coding skills will commoditise and disappear. How many hear can read PostScript, raise your hands! Not too many. I figured as much... FreeHand, Fontographer, and Illustrator removed the need to know how to program a page description in PostScript. Dreamweaver ate HTML and trivial Javascript. AJAX is next... I'd say, give it 2 years. Tops. I'm sure the programmers at Adobe are hard at work mulling over how to do just that.
RS
how far HAVE we come? (Score:5, Insightful)
It does suck.
As for the "refreshing[] hard-headed" questions, all I see are questions about performance and silly flitting about with their own buzzwords and pipe dreams about getting rid of real applications in favor of their toys.
Here are some questions:
I'm implementing Web-based applications as of this writing, and I plan to have some dynamic features to simplify some of the UI (such as cascading follow-up questions during user signup). But these will be an optional extra.
These jokers forget that the World Wide Web is a repository for mutual citation of academic-style documents. New stuff is good, just don't break the old stuff.
Every improvement on the Internet has been in the direction of better user controls, decentralization, caching, peer-to-peer, transport tunnels, etc. The AJAX people are swimming against the tide and they need to realize it and shape up.
silverlight (Score:5, Interesting)
but i believe silverlight will be a large part of the rich web
now this is my personal opinion and heres why:
*it was designed with web applications in mind (XAML) unlike the current html/css/javascript mess
*its more or less crossplatform
*it brings C# to the clients browser (see javascript mess above)
*has vector and hd video supprt of the box
*is designed to be easily updated
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Silverlight is like flash, only worse:
* It ignores all the work on document layout and styling, instead it chooses to reinvent the wheel. XAML is untested beyond a few Windows developers and power users on Windows with a PC. HTML has been deployed, tested & debugged on about every platform i
AJAX directions (Score:4, Interesting)
Q1: How do you deploy an AJAX application offline?
A1: You can use integrated HTML/CSS/JS/Flash/PDF runtime, like Adobe AIR [adobe.com].
Q2: How do I deliver bulky complex AJAX applications over the net, if it's a lot of code?
A2: You don't. It's not a suitable deployment model, at least until we have a simple delivery vehicle for bundling multiple app elements into a single file, such as a browser downloading and directly reading a ZIP file with collection of resources/JS files (as with Java's JAR). Until then, and for complex UI-s in general, look into established compiled solutions like Flash.
Q3: Do we need JS2.0?
A3: No, we don't (right now), since JS2 delivers benefits for larger projects only (refer to Q2 why large online JS projects are not viable). If this is resolved, then JS2 will be highly desirable.
Q4: Hand-made AJAX or AJAX framework?
Q4: Framework. Cuts development time, provides consistent code, avoid wheel reinvention (Exception: very large projects may need custom code. Are you Google? Yahoo? If not, use a framework).
Q5: Is AJAX wide-spread / easy / hard / common?
Q5: It's easy, wide-spread, and accepted. Fallback is usually present, unless the AJAX is a component of a complex online app that can't have no-JS fallback (example: rich text editor).
Q6: Do I pick AJAX or Web 1.0 / iPhone SDK ?
A6: Apply common sense. In general, when a new technology comes around, people abuse it and try to shoehorn it into replacing everything before it [morfik.com]. Then comes the backlash ("AJAX sucks"). Only then, people settle to use said tech in moderation, co-existing versus replacing, evolution versus revolution, and solving unique problems not solved before.
AJAX still sucks (Score:3, Insightful)
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The concurrency model is lame and buggy. Open Google Maps in Firefox 2. Roll the mouse wheel rapidly to zoom in and out. Watch the maps break up as the browser gets out of sync with the server and doesn't properly repair the window damage. It's like a window system from 1990 or so.
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Firewalls and AJAX still don't play well together. Rewriting JavaScript source in the firewall is not the answer.
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The conflicts between cross-site scripting, mashups, and security illustrate that Javascript's security model is inadequate.
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The JSON concept opens security holes. JavaScript has the wrong primitives. In LISP, there's the reader, which takes in a string and turns it into an S-expression, and there's "eval", which executes an S-expression. In JavaScript, there's only "eval", which takes a string and runs it. Oops. Not the right tool for marshalling.
JavaScript itself isn't that bad a language, though. It's the integration with browsers that's not good enough.Let's see (Score:4, Insightful)
Then, there was n-tier with the thin client.
Now, the client seems past the bout of anorexia, we've gone back to client/server, and AJAX has fattened it right up.
Next (mis)step? N-tier, repackaged as "federated", with an emphasis on thin, mobile clients. But you knew that. The real question is, what will AJAX for the hand-held be called? I say: BORAXO [boraxo.com].
I will confess some guilt that this has not been reduced to a Burma Shave troll, but I'm still slightly under the weather.
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If a user has bad vision, they can feed text into a text to speech converter. GUI into a speech converter doesn't work so well. There are an increasing number of older folks using the web, and expecting a large screen real state is not appropriate -
Re:When did AJAX stop sucking? (Score:4, Insightful)
Developing for the web is about knowing your audience. If I were designing a site like ebay or amazon, in other words, trying to have the widest possible user base, or if I were working for some entity that had to abide by ADA requirements, then maybe avoiding AJAX would be advisable. For a site that is not a necessity, like, for example, youtube, slashdot, digg, flickr, etc AJAX is great. When done properly, AJAX makes more efficient applications that enhance the user experience.
Also, if you really want to, you can develop sites that use AJAX but also degrade nicely. Everyone here (at least, anyone who calls himself a serious web developer) is using web standards and writing good semantic markup, right? Well, that will make your site at least accessible. If you just use the noscript tag to handle non javascript user agents (where necessary, obviously not where there isn't ROI anyway) then your site should work pretty well.
As someone else who replied to you mentioned, we cannot develop web sites around people who for some crazy reason refuse to use new technologies (if you call javascript new, as if!). That, along with MSIE, are holding the web back.
I think people who hate AJAX just hate it because of all the bad AJAX sites. But that's like hating the web because there are bad non-ajax sites. AJAX, like other technologies, makes things better when used properly.
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Re:Ajax will be obsolete before it becomes mainstr (Score:5, Informative)
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Flash!?! Have you every built an application in flash? It's a nightmare to maintain.
Screw that, flash is a disaster to *use*. Flash causes a reflex in me that causes me to mash the 'back' button ASAP.
Do you also welcome AJAX hosts holding your data? (Score:4, Insightful)
However, one thing that continues to surprise me is how willing most people are to having a third party store all of their data. All AJAX apps essentially require that you do not hold your own data -- it's held by the application provider. A big reason is because Javascript can't touch your local filesystem, but another is that Javascript isn't powerful enough to really be useful for all of the processing, so back to the server-side scripting it goes.
In fact, one of the things that scared me today was how excited a friend was to discover that Google's chat application logged all of their Jabber conversations -- even if they had been made with a 3rd party GUI client (Pidgin). This, to me, would just be scary.
--
Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation. [nerdkits.com]
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Re:Do you also welcome AJAX hosts holding your dat (Score:4, Informative)
How does that differ from regular web applications holding your data? There's been well over a decade of time for users to become comfortable or uncomfortable with the idea of entrusting a third party with their data. So far, users have been leaning toward "comfortable".
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I'd say users have been leading towards "don't care". Of course the solution is to host your own web/app server. Then your client talks to your server and stores your data.
Javascript and HTML are for content and presentation, not processing data. That's because browsers are optomised as display platforms,
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Not exactly true. Javascript was not invented to be a scripting environment for Java. It wasn't named Javascript ini
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Self Java -> Mocha -> Livescript -> Javascript
Brendan Eich practically never talks about the Self Java/Mocha days of Javascript. Not all that many people even remember the working title "Mocha". (Implying its early relationship to Java.) Scripting of Java was the goal in those revisions. Javascript 1.0 was kicked out the door incomplete, but 1.1 addressed the initial issues. The JavaClass and Package objects
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Please check thy facts, kind sir. Javascript was conceived of as a Java-like script language. A poor man's Java for those that found object oriented concepts a little too brain intensive. Thrown in the first netscape browser to allow a little customisation of the DOM on the fly, for things that then then HTML 3 couldn't do properly.
Javascript is not an object oriented
Re:Do you also welcome AJAX hosts holding your dat (Score:5, Informative)
You may be surprised to know that I am well in possession of the facts. I used to believe that Javascript (formerly Livescript, formerly Mocha) got its name in simply a cross-branding deal. In fact, it was far more complex than that. Javascript was created to script Java as well as the DOM. The original concept would have blown today's AJAX out of the water in usability. Alas, it was not to be.
Here's more history for you: http://safari.oreilly.com/0768666775/ch01lev1sec1 [oreilly.com]
Also, here's a bit of Javascript for you, demonstrating how powerful it was intended to be:
(That will work in FireFox with a recent Java plugin. I guarantee that it will not work on Internet Explorer.)
;)
You have to remember, Java already existed in the browser when Javascript was created. Netscape internally discussed just using Java itself for scripting, but decided that a new, more dynamic scripting language would be more useful. (Source [netscape.com]) Thus the birth of Javascript. Eich described the first revision as "having gotten out of the lab a bit earlier than intended [scribemedia.org]". Javascript 1.1 was much closer to his vision, and what we think of today when we talk about Javascript.
You also need to understand that the Javascript language went beyond just the browser. Much of its development was driven by its use as a server-side CGI language [sco.com]. So it became a "real" language very quickly, despite its slow start.
And if you think that's cool, remind me sometime to tell you about how multipart/x-mixed-replace could have been server-side push long before AJAX, Comet, or <event-source> ever existed.
Incorrect. Prototype-based languages [wikipedia.org] are very much OO languages. They're different from class-based, languages, but that doesn't make them any less powerful.
I think you misunderstand the very meaning of polymorphism if you believe that.
Here's the "Runnable" interface implemented in Javascript:
The polymorphism appears to work fine?
Funny, Netscape's Client Guide has an entire chapter [mozilla.org] on that.
Strong typing [wikipedia.org] is not a OOP requirement. It is a feature of some languages. Nothing more, nothing less. In any case, Javascript actually has quite a few typing fe
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Re:Do you also welcome AJAX hosts holding your dat (Score:5, Insightful)
Correct. And what happened to Netscape's market share?
I hardly think that a "minority" of the development community are the ones mad at Microsoft. Anyone who has used IE to any appreciable degree is mad at them. When 5.0 came out back in '99, it was incredible. The best browser, bar none. Microsoft released a fairly insignificant update called 6.0 in '01 and that was where the browser sat. For about 5 years. Then when everyone had almost given up hope that Microsoft would keep developing their browser, they announced 7.0. They also announced how they were going to meet W3C standards and make developer's lives better. 7.0 came out, and it turns out that Microsoft couldn't even be bothered to add support for simple things like DOM2 Events or SVG. (Things which they effectively already had support for, just in a proprietary-yet-not-quite-dislike manner.) In reality, they stamped out a few CSS bugs, screwed up the IE interface, then developed a new certificate scheme that was practically the same as the old one but made more money for all involved.
The funny thing is, the only reason why IE hasn't died out is aforementioned monopoly power. I have met very few users who prefer IE over Firefox or Safari. However, I have met managers who force the use of IE (thus leaving themselves vulnerable to IE's massive security holes) for the purpose of 100% Microsoft "corporate standards". As a result, IE has lost market share in the home computer segment, but is not taking any losses in the B2B arena. And it's NOT because it's a good product.
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Re:Do you also welcome AJAX hosts holding your dat (Score:3, Interesting)
You're referring to software as a service, not Ajax. An application ran as a service by an outside vendor can hold your data hostage, whether or not it uses Ajax, and an application running within your organisation doesn't, whether or not it uses Ajax. The key is who runs the application, not whether it uses Ajax.
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Yes people that use flash for layout and menus are just as stupid as people that used Java buttons.
But Google doesn't need to read applications.