Jan 04 2006
Web 2.0: the non-bookmarkable Web?
Web 2.0, Ajax: the community has discovered a new way of doing things and is bringing us lots of cool new sites and services.
As I read del.icio.us’s most popular list about a month ago, I saw that lots of people were impressed by AjaxWhois.com, a domain name lookup and Whois for most TLDs in a Web 2.0 fashion
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Today, people on Digg are very happy about another Whois service using the powers of Web 2.0
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In both cases, the service provided is one that existed before. It’s now done differently, with a better look and feel. However, in both cases, users are losing one core feature of the Web: you can’t bookmark results of what is a very simple query. You have to use a Web 1.0 Whois lookup service if you want to send a pointer to results a search.
Redoing things with Ajax and just giving them new names certainly seems very fashionable. However, while Ajax brings some really cool features in some contexts (e.g. the interface for editing photo metadata in Flickr), it really doesn’t belong everywhere.
January 4th, 2006 at 19:58
Yes, there are bad uses of Ajax just as there are of flash, Javascript etc. There is an increasing movement to define best practice uses of Ajax which I’m keeping an eye on, see for instance this post. I particularly like the “* Plan for Ajax from the start. * Implement Ajax at the end.” point, which I’ve seen mentioned by the Rails folk too. Am hoping to have at least one XTech presentation on this topic.