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.