is ajax the new blink tag?
I was listening to a SXSW podcast this morning on the way into work about “Ajax — What Do I Need to Know” and Jesse James Garrett said the following about Ajax.
People tend to think of Ajax as a magic bullet … but it’s a bullet it’s really easy to shoot yourself in the foot with.
That got me thinking. Now that it’s so easy to add rich UI content, I predict we’ll see the same thing as when HTML and Javascript initially became popular - when people used the <blink/> tag on websites just because they could. And everyone knew how to copy and paste javascript to add statusbar tickers and marquees to their pages just to show everyone how cool their pages were. More javascript means cooler design, right?
Counters and clocks, animated gifs of everything, javascript rollovers were all the “it” thing to do. I think we’ll see the start of same thing with AJAX for the first while as it becomes popular and everyone wants to put Google Maps on their site and become a part of Web 2.0. 2 years from now, it’ll remain useful for creating real content and it’s won’t be so much hype anymore. By that point, people will have moved on to the next hot thing - embedding video feeds everywhere in their pages.