Hurricane Ajax - The Aftermath

As I write this http://usabilityviews.com/ajaxsucks.html is at number 4 on the del.icio.us popular page. This is my most successful "net event" yet.

Donna Maurer was the first person to read the article and notice that is was a spoof. (Well done Donna).

Here are a selection of comments about the articles that have been posted since it was published two hours ago. I promise that all of these comments are real and I haven't changed any of them. I would encourage you to visit the linked sites to read more of the comments.

I just hope that Jakob sees the funny side and doesn't get too upset.

Posted on DonnaM

"Shortly, I'm sure Jakob will say that 99% of all Ajax sucks; and we'll be doomed to an interaction-poor internet and a huge round of stupid arguments for a couple of years".

Posted on Ajaxian

Web usability pioneer Jakob Nielsen gives Ajax a big fat thumbs-down in his latest Alertbox, though is a little more optimistic than his previous "Just Say No" stance (in the sense of improving from an "F-" to an "F"). An article like this deserves an extended response...

Posted on digg

Good article from a very well respected usability expert. This should at least be considered

You silly people. Scroll to the bottom of the article and READ. :)

I'm sick of people saying Ajax sucks because it broke the back button. The internet is still in such early stages of development that maybe the back button is on it's way out.

11% using mobile browser?! Yea right! This artical no longer has any credibility since they are going to just throw out random number like that. This is stupid

Posted on Web Coder Plus

I stumbled across a link at digg.com to a page that looked like it was the latest Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox. Titled, Why Ajax Sucks (Most of the Time), I read it and was completely unaware that is was a spoof until I got to the following section...

Posted on del.icio.us

interesting read. And an endorsement of all-lower-case "ajax"?

"When It's OK to Use Ajax - If you are working in a Web2.0 company that needs to provide evidence of their technical expertise in order to gain new clients." Pretty brilliant spoof.

Very persuasive philosophical argument against using ajax

He used the Web 2.0 business idea generator at the end, didn't he? That cheeky bastard.

Alles lezen tot het einde anders mis je het hele verhaal. Een hoop redenen waarom je Ajax voorzichting moet behandelen en waarom niet zomaar op de high-tech trein te springen.

Search and replace "Ajax" with "frames" and it's like an article Jakob wrote years back.

Looks like quite a few of you didn't, y'know, bother to read to the end of this article or realise it was a spoof. IT IS NOT BY JAKOB NIELSEN. Jesus Wept. The del.icio.us Horde: the Slashdot Horde for the 21st century.

Interesting to hear from a longtime vet on a hot trend

A "spoof" with a point. I'm not a huge fan of this kind of sweeping statement, but there are some good points in here. As with most everything "Web" -- it depends on the project, etc.

As Donna M predicted, Jakob Neilsen lashes out at AJAX in his latest AlertBox post. To some degree though, he has a very good point. Poor AJAX implementation will cause more harm than good and breaking the widely-accepted page model challenges users.

Posted on Manish Jethani

In this month's Alertbox, Jakob Nielsen offers a second opinion on Ajax.

The fundamental problems with Ajax that Nielsen is referring to are exactly the ones I had mentioned on my blog in May. Since that post, Backbase has added bookmarking support to their website (and I presume their framework).

Posted on Slashdot

Ajax on my CMS admin interface is good. Ajax on my site's homepage is not neccessary. Lets not confuse what Ajax is with how people use it

If sites DON'T implement Ajax, engines will have NO REASON to support Ajax navigation. /Wasn't worth my time, but I'm REALLY sick of seeing these pointless Ajax bashing articles/posts.

Flash is not an acronym.

It's not that the page itself is supposed to be atomic, but that the identifier used to refer to it is. There is a distinction between the two.

It speaks for itself, but it doesn't say anything coherent

Isnt this the EXACT same reason we are told not to use frames?

I've been reading Jakob's blog for years. He's one of those 50-50 guys. Half of what he says is dead on, and the other half is complete crap. I got a real chuckle at the end of this article when I saw: "Next month: Micropayments will take off in 2006."

So the article is a spoof -- knew I'd read all that already somewhere -- but I say it's illegitimate : comparing AJAX to frames is most insulting in the most unjustifiable way.

Ajax is a methodology.

Well, I'm with the author. However, I think the back button thing and non working bookmarks are intentional, by design.

I think that the author has mistakenly correlated frames and AJAX. Application state and browser state can be separate and usable.

Despite the fact that this is a spoof article, it's still a good opportunity to discuss the accessibility issues

You know, a lot of people will read this and not understand that it's a joke. If five years from now, the general population thinks that it is a MS technology, we'll know where it started!

The author has clear gripes with the misuse of AJAX, but his claim that it should be banished to "Web2.0" companies and kept in permanent beta, never to be fed after midnight is a bit harsh for a technology that does one thing and does it well.

I was interested in reading the article until I found out it was by Jakob Nielsen.

Should have read the WHOLE article before clicking "submit". :) Still, spoof or not, makes valid points :)

I read the article and I am not impressed. The complaints are mostly trivial or nonexistent with proper coding and design.

Funny you should say that, since the article basically took a real Jakob Nielson article and replaced the word "frames" with "AJAX."

Posted on Web2.0 Blog

What amazes me most is that the post is actually largely relevant as can be seen by the fact that Michael Mahemoff was completely taken in by it in his original post over on Ajaxian.com. His post has now been updated to indicate that Jakob’s post was a spoof. Michael does a pretty good job of rebutting Jakob’s spoof claims and defending Ajax, which for Ajax developers is a good thing, but it does highlight the fact that web developers do need to be careful. The issues of browser support, unique URLs, searching and printing are very real and need to be considered by the Ajax developer.

Comments

[Chris McEvoy]

Nathaniel Schutta has posted an item which makes some very good points.

http://ntschutta.com/jat/2005/12/07/the-ajax-spoof/

[Chris McEvoy]

It was not my intention to send up Jakob Nielsen with this article, and I apologise to Jakob for any trouble caused.

Just to make it clear: I took the "Frames Suck" alertbox article from Dec 1996 and changed "Frames" to "Ajax". I also changed the "OK to use Ajax" section and changed the destination of many of the links.

I also made it clear at the bottom of the article that it was a spoof.

My intention was to try and damp down some of the hype around Ajax and to make the point that the user (not the technology) should be at the centre of everything we do.

I think that this has shown how people may not read articles carefully enough as I expected anyone who read alertbox articles to spot this fake very quickly as I put a lot of clues in there:

Most of the link destinations are obviously "wrong".

The first sentence: "the most controversial statement I have made in my Alertbox columns so far was to make 'the use of Ajax' one of the mistakes in my list of top ten mistakes in Web design."

Jakob has never put "the use of Ajax" in any of his top ten mistakes list.

The "Ajax free" banner links to my blog.

Lower case "ajax"

The "OK to use Ajax" section uses examples from the "Web 2.0 business idea generator"
http://andrewwooldridge.com/myapps/webtwopointoh.html

I expected that anyone with more than a passing knowledge of Ajax development od usability would have picked up on these clues more readily.

Perhaps this was taken more seriously than intended because it actually has some validity?

[Chris]

Well I seem to be in good company having read it without realising it was a spoof (although I was thrown by the sentence "In the long term, we will need a richer model for hypertext nodes on the Web than can be supported by frames", which seems to have got through un-ajaxed.) But I have to say that it's not a very good spoof because it's bascially true. I am involved in devloping an ajax site at the moment, and the accessibility issues mentioned are precisely the ones we've been thinking about. And aren't frames basically deprecated now because of accessibility issues? Nielsen may be a fuddy-duddy with an ugly website, but his central thesis is pretty sound. So what was the point in sending him up?

[Ian MacLeod]

I would also like to point out that Ajax does not necessarily break the forward/back capabilities of the browser, nor bookmarking and informative URLs. Of course, the way to "get around" this percieved limit will take additional effort on the developer's part, as well as yet more JS code. As an example, take a look at:

http://www.backbase.com/demos/explorer/#examples/b-toolbar.xml
as opposed to:
http://www.backbase.com/demos/explorer/#examples/table_sorting.xml

You'll also notice that, as you navigate through these examples, that the forward and back functionality of the browsers is preserved.

Of course, this isn't "a part" of the browser's navigational model, so it is up to the developer on how to implement such functionality (and thus opens a gaping hole in potential consistency)

Finally, I'm not 100% sure on this, but I'm guessing that most search engines ignore the #target portion of any linked URL, so it still is not effective for that.

So, I guess my point is, people love to break things, but don't often spend the time to fix them. (So it's not *impossible* to fix these claims, it's just difficult and beyond the scope of may web projects currently in production/development)