Web Coder Plus

Seems every web design site you look at these days is going on and on about web 2.0 and AJAX. The two come together so often in blogs you could be excused for thinking you can’t have one without the other. This is bad, in case you didn’t know!

Web 2.0, the term O’Reilly came up with to describe the next generation of web pages that are proliferating these days, is about the user experience. This is of course a extreme simplification, but I believe it is true. The user experience is and has always been the number one reason why a site succeeds or not, even back in the beginning before we were thinking of a web beyond “1.0″. And while users have grown to expect more, certain things still remain critical. That is:

1. Speed of the site
2. Ease of use
3. Browser compatibility

Back in the 90’s when I first tackled web design (and badly), the search for information inevitably took me to sites filled with cool JavaScripts. The general idea I got was that no page is complete without at least 10 of these things making graphics flash, buttons roll over, text scroll. By the time I was finished, the web page was an eyesore and hell to maintain. It was slow, not entirely easy to use, and since there were only really two browsers I coded for, barely compatible.

Scroll forward to 2005, and the new web developer to be, is going to more than likely come to the conclusion that AJAX is a requirement for any successful web site. Only now, with the exception of #2, the basic requirements are even harder to achieve. Already there are bloated AJAX applications abound on the net, filled to the brim with cool features that frustrate the hell out of their users because they grind the PC down to a slow crawl. Very few of these applications seem to support more IE and firefox, leaving at the very least 5% of the web browsing population unable to use the application. This 5% however, is mostly an extremely tech savvy section of the population, and to lose them can hurt you way more than you might think.

Before embarking on designing and coding an epic AJAX application, ask yourself this question: Can it be done with a normal HTML web page? If the answer is yes, then maybe you should consider whether the AJAX application is worth it. Could you not supply a web page first, and then once the users are using that add an AJAX application that can replace it if the user wants?

Design your web page to be standards compliant first, then the AJAX applications to fit within it, and to always have a non AJAX version of each page to cater for those browsers which are not compatible and the users who chose to switch JavaScript off.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 6th, 2005 at 1:06 pm and is filed under Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.