Brave Tech World

November 6, 2006

MON 6 NOV 2006

AJAX gone too far... By Marcelo

 

    This was scheduled to happen. I even wrote before about how AJAX can be misused.

 

    I just read on John Cook's blog about this new product called GeoJoey. It is another one of those sites with map mashups, where you can write about your experience at some place.

 

    I went to check the service and I was a bit surprise by the size of the URL on John Cook's blog. Then I notice that they are using 100% AJAX (translation: the site has only 1 page), and every parameter is being passed as a URL Hash string.

 

    This is bad. This is beyond bad. This is super-duper bad.

 

    Here are a few reasons why...

 

1) Search Engines

    Search Engines are already not a big fan of query string (like in http://domain.com?id=123). Hash strings is simply absurd, like http://domain.com?id=123#hash. I doubet that any search engine uses that information. I'm actually willing to bet that no major search engine considers "#123" different from "#1234".

 

 

2) Email

    You know the biggest enabler to make a product viral? Make so that people easily share the URL by email, like in the case of YouTube. The problem with huge URLs is that a lot of encoding, decoding, escaping, unescaping, and other nasty stuff happens between a sender and a receiver of an email, and it is not that hard to have URLs being broken between multiple lines (usually anything with more than 70 characters has the potential to be broken).

     The URL that I'm seeing on my browser right now has 190 characters.

 

 

3) Forms

    Any decent developer adds limitations to the input parameters that they can receive. Yes, the standard says that URLs can be 2048 characters. Actually, the standard doesn't really have a limit, but that is what a lot of people has been using. Turns out that a lot of sites and applications sets the limit at a way smaller size, like 128 characters, sometimes even 64 characters. Well, you won't be able to paste a GeoJoey link.

 

 

4) Usability

    AJAX is great if used properly. AJAX is horrible in terms of users experience on the Web if over-used. Users, for the last 15 years or so, have been used to non-AJAX apps, with forms that load new pages, with clicks that load new pages. I'm not going to say that no page loads is better or worse, it is just different. When you try to push the envelope in creating a site that is 100% AJAX you pushed it too far. Users are not used to that, it will fell weird for most users.

 

 

    Now, all that I said above is fact-based (challenge me in the comments if you believe I'm incorrect), for my personal opinion... This is just another map mashup site.