Emerging from the Shower

5 April 2005

I share a similar discomfort with the term ajax as I do with DHTML. Back in the day we took the concept of HTML styled with CSS, made interactive with JavaScript and accessed through the Document Object Model, and termed it DHTML. This act alone made it easy to describe how those technologies could be used together for what was, at the time, innovative things.

The same is true of ajax. It stands of Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, which in turn stands for look at me I’m a geek and you don’t understand what I’m saying. It does, however, give us a useful way of describing the whole xmlhttprequest thing and how JavaScript, XML, server-side code and out-of-process HTTP requests can interact with HTML to make interfaces a little more interactive/responsive.

We don’t use the term DHTML any more because what was innovative when the term was invented is every day now, and no one needs a generic term to describe that stuff. We all know how HTML, CSS, JavaScript and the DOM can be used together to manipulate the page because we’re all doing it every day. Plus it confuses recruitment agents. But I’m sure that there are already job specs in the hands of confused recruitment agents stating a requirement for ajax, and well, if it keeps the wheels turning then so be it. I’m sure the label will serve a purpose and then slip away. Who cares about names anyway.

Cool Ajax Stuff

It’s worth highlighting the fantastic effort that is being put into native support for ajax in Ruby on Rails. Those guys are busy building a web app framework that is not only quick and efficient, but is modern and effortless. One of the mail principals of their integration effort seems to be to make ajax a transparent design choice. If the design calls for ajax then it’s no more effort than traditional postbacks, you just flick the switch. These guys have got their heads screwed on.

Other news

I started a new job a few weeks back, and that’s been consuming a lot of cycles. I’m not good with change – I find it sometimes takes a while to acclimatise. I’m beginning to settle in, but I still need to work out the balance and make sure I’m not posting about stuff without due consideration to my new employer. Haven’t found my stride yet. I don’t feel like myself at the moment.

Emerging from the shower … but was it all a dream?

About Drew McLellan

Drew McLellan (@drewm) has been hacking on the web since around 1996 following an unfortunate incident with a margarine tub. Since then he’s spread himself between both front- and back-end development projects, and now is Director and Senior Web Developer at edgeofmyseat.com in Maidenhead, UK (GEO: 51.5217, -0.7177). Prior to this, Drew was a Web Developer for Yahoo!, and before that primarily worked as a technical lead within design and branding agencies for clients such as Nissan, Goodyear Dunlop, Siemens/Bosch, Cadburys, ICI Dulux and Virgin.net. Somewhere along the way, Drew managed to get himself embroiled with Dreamweaver and was made an early Macromedia Evangelist for that product. This lead to book deals, public appearances, fame, glory, and his eventual downfall.

Picking himself up again, Drew is now a strong advocate for best practises, and stood as Group Lead for The Web Standards Project 2006-08. He has had articles published by A List Apart, Adobe, and O’Reilly Media’s XML.com, mostly due to mistaken identity. Drew is a proponent of the lower-case semantic web, and is currently expending energies in the direction of the microformats movement, with particular interests in making parsers an off-the-shelf commodity and developing simple UI conventions. He writes here at all in the head and, with a little help from his friends, at 24 ways.

Comments

§ kumar mcmillan: uggh. I hate talking in acronyms—I agree. A word about Ruby : I think rails is one of the most complete/ flexible “frameworks” available for a viable platform (that excludes java folks). But, Ruby is still, to me, Perl written in Japanese! It is not as intuitive as Python—a comparable language—and today’s Ruby code still bears many “magical” Perl tricks that make me cringe … not to mention it induces painful memories :(
§ Tim: sounds like some HDD again.
§ Matthew Pennell: The biggest problem with Ajax at the moment is its accessibility issues – as far as I can see at the moment, there is no way that it (or any DOM-scripting for that matter) can alert a user of assistive technology such as screenreaders that a part of the page has been updated. Until that issue is addressed, I can see a lot of “coding around” Ajax to get sites to meet accessibility criteria.

Like the Dallas/Dynasty reference, by the way…
§ Jonathan Fenocchi: I don’t like the term DHTML as it has a tendency to mean, “Inaccessible JavaScript, HTML and CSS mixed together to make objects on a page flash, move or induce seizures in some other way unimaginable.” Otherwise, I don’t particularly mind the use of the term. The same applies with Ajax. I use the term because when you say, “XMLHttpRequest in JavaScript to send a request to the server without reloading the page,” you not only waste your breath but can more easily confuse someone. Additionally, “Ajax” fits better in a sentence, making it more concise. (After all, definitions are described by other definitions; the primary “undefined” terms which we understand are the building blocks. If that made no sense, go take Geometry again. ;-) )

Ajax boasts some new, great opportunities. Once I found Livesearch from Bitflux (via a link from Colly Logic), I was captivated. Recently I took on a challenge to create a Java-free, virtually instant messaging system on a web page. I think I’ve done that.

About RoR, I agree with Kumar McMillan. From what I’ve seen (and I’m no RoR programmer yet), the syntax is a bit obscure. I like Python’s syntax a great deal more.
§ Sunny: Just another means to guarantee the survival of marketeers. Coming up with newer names for existent technology is the raison-d-etre for such folks..err..”consultants”.

All in the <head>