Web Coder Plus

I stumbled across an interesting list of Ajax Mistakes today. If you’ve read my post, AJAX - Please think twice, then you already know that I am very wary of overusing what is admittedly a cool combination of technologies. Anyway, I think this list should be considered a must read if you are planning to write an AJAX application. If you can get through it and still justify your AJAX application, then it probably is worth doing.

Mentioned in this list is Marcus Baker’s blog entry, Listen kids, AJAX is not cool. An excellent read, and brings up a very good point. Desktop applications need to respond within 1/10th of a second for the user to feel that they are having a direct influence, and this feeling has an impact on how the user responds to the program. Web pages escape this to a degree since the user feels they are just accessing data, rather than actually working with an application. However, AJAX often attempts to replicate the look and feel of a desktop application, and thus begins to suffer from this rule. It is impossible to maintain sub 100ms response times consistently for all users over the internet, and so your AJAX application will always react like a badly written, slow, desktop app unless you are very careful to hide the lag.

The benefits need to outweigh the drawbacks before any AJAX application is tackled, so the first thing you need to learn, is not how to code it, but what the drawbacks are, and how to overcome them.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 2nd, 2005 at 4:14 pm and is filed under Usability, 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.