A List Apart: Articles: Valentine’s Day Massacre
A List Apart: Articles: Valentine’s Day Massacre
Niklas Brunberg, freelance designer and interaction designer
I’d guess you will and won’t be surprised by my “most hated of today day†choice: AJAX.
Well, it’s rather the implementation of it that gets my eyes twitching and boggles my mind. There is a simple reason behind this and the reason is spelled “browser back button.†Anything that has to do with an AJAX application isn’t bad, in fact I find it wonderful and plan to use it in upcoming projects. However, as a person surfing the web I’m baffled by the normal text fields “powered by AJAX†that suddenly empty themselves when the back button is used.Many more casual users will find this even more irritating, not knowing what to blame when their back button is no longer working as they expect it to.
I have to agree here. I have been experimenting with ‘AJAX technologies’ mostly to get my head around the technicalities, but one thing that I have come up against is the potential for breaking the user’s flow through a site. That is not good.
WordPress seems to me to be using AJAX in a way that is sensitive, using javascript to move elements around the screen, load information when needed, and save information back to the server. I can still navigate back through the admin interface using my back button, but because WordPress is handling the submittion of data via ‘AJAX’, I am not faced with the possibility of multiple resubmission of POST forms. and I certainly do not get those annoying ‘this page has expired’ messages.
In this context the use of AJAX has solved one of the long standing problems with back buttons and form submission. This is good.
We should not be re-coding all our old websites using a new technology. We should be using the new technology to fix those problems with our old sites, and find new ways to enhance the users experience. We certainly should not be duplicating browser functionality with a browser. That is madness.
Technorati Tags: web 2.0, AJAX, Javascript, user interaction, wordpress