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When *not to* use AJAX
Angsuman Chakraborty
April 18th, 2005
An example of wrong usage of AJAX aka XmlHttpRequest based web applications - TinkingTeam Corporate Website. Here the menu content is dynamically fetched using Ajax.
This is bad because:
- Search engines like google cannot see it.
- Users cannot bookmark the pages.
- It doesn't indicate anything is happening, which can be bothering over slow connections. This can be remedied by an "in progress" message like GMail.
The first two points reminds me of Flash only pages.
Ajax is good for dynamic content update within a page. It should not be used to replace the page paradigm of web documents.
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April 19th, 2005 at 4:40 am
Everything you said applies. But the worst part of that implementation, if you as me, is that the back button is destroyed. Click a menu item view a page, hit back to view the page I was just on and poof, I’m whisked off their site and back to wherever I was before. (Or, nothing at all happens, if I arrived via bookmark.)
No matter what web designers may or may not believe when they put together a page, users use the back button all the time. Especially on slow connections. Anything that breaks its function should be done with EXTREME caution.
April 19th, 2005 at 5:19 am
I agree. Back button is very integral to the web experience. Users have become accustomed to it.
April 23rd, 2005 at 4:28 am
unless of course, you’re building an intranet application to replace chunks of say lotus, access, php-groupware etc.. in which case you ditch the back button entirely because you don’t want your users to think that it is in fact ‘just’ a web page, and you use ajax whereever makes sense.
if ajax breaks the back button, you aren’t required to ditch ajax.. you could also ditch the back button. of course, for most apps, this is completely inapplicable and would be very bad form.
May 9th, 2005 at 9:23 am
Ajax and weblogs
If you take a look at the front page of kottke.org, you’ll notice a pulldown at the top of the content column (on the left). When you mouse over the menu, you’re presented with a list of choices of what to display in that column and when you click on…
May 9th, 2005 at 10:48 am
[...] explains the technique here in a helpful walkthrough. UPDATE: He also links to nice post how not to use AJAX. This entry was posted [...]
May 11th, 2005 at 8:22 am
Geez … it also appears to use synchronous ajax loading, freezing my browser when the site isn’t responding quickly enough.
This is terrible!
May 15th, 2005 at 6:58 pm
Yeah, synchronous loading defeates the entire purpose. It’s posisbly even worse than the traditional method as your browser freezes. You may as well reload the entire page.
It’ll be the next tech abused by bad clients and bad developers.
October 8th, 2005 at 1:48 am
If you decide that you want to make a Web application, and not just a static Web page… http://tom.gilki.org/programming/javascript/Login/
You can do your best to ensure that you users get the best experience by following some common practices.
June 16th, 2007 at 4:17 am
hi, i found a full ajax website, and the back button works : http://itbreaks.net
February 13th, 2008 at 3:20 am
yeah …
But Using ajax i can make my grid wrk like Excel … [cant have dreamt of that without ajax ]