Cutting Through the Ajax Hype

An anonymous reader writes "If you're thinking about building an Ajax application of your own, this article would be a good place to start. It's an introductory-level guide about when and how to implement Ajax. It provides a balanced discussion about where exactly using Ajax makes sense, and where it does not."

Re:AJAX's hatred of the middle-click.

[Bogtha]

With Firefox and Opera, one is able to open a link in a new tab by middle clicking on it. But unfortunately, many AJAX-enabled Web apps disallow such functionality, for whatever reason.

It's not Ajax per se that disallows it. The problem is that a lot of developers use <a href="#" onclick="..."> and don't provide an actual URI to open.

GMail is a major culprit.

Yes, it is, and I've said as much in the past. It's actually even worse than the average clueless developer, because it doesn't even use <a> for links - it uses <span> and click handlers to provide really, really crappy emulated links. Of course, doing so immediately throws the normal link handling your web browser provides out the window, including (but not limited to) opening them in new tabs or windows.

Basically every AJAX site I've tried has interfered some way with traditional ways of browsing. I don't know if it's an inherent limitation with AJAX

It's not. It's usually either developer ignorance or developer apathy - they either don't know how to do it or they don't care.

Re:The Answer is a Framework

[Shados]

Hmm...did I miss something? While Atlas does add quite a bit of features, if you're sticking to ajax functionalities, 1, 2, and 3 are handled quite gracefully... For example, my sites that use Atlas's ajax functionalities degrade perfectly to normal post behaviors if javascript is disabled.