To AJAX Or Not To AJAX That Is The Question
Posted by Guy Naor Fri, 15 Sep 2006 02:45:05 GMT
I'm sure this would have been Hamlet's question has he been with us today working as a web developer.
This subject was beaten to death already, but just a few days ago I was presented with just that decision, and it made it really clear in my mind. In my case the decision was simple, but I know it's not always the case. So having reference points might help others.
While developing the help system for Famundo that I mentioned yesterday, the admin part was developed with Ajax Scaffold and is very very nice and useable. When I did the public face of the help system, I continued with a full Ajax solution. The table of content, the internal linking and the tagging mechanism, all updated the main view using Ajax.
It was cool, it was nice, but it was a disaster as far as useability goes. You can't go forward and backward betweeb pages you've read and it makes navigation a nightmare for the user. It took me a few minutes of really trying to use it to figure this part really doesn't work well with Ajax. So instead of that I made everything into regular links, added VERY aggressive caching and it's much better now. The only thing I left with Ajax is the search which makes sense to do this way.
My conclusion from that is that if navigation is a central part of the functionality - don't do Ajax. Just use standard and expected navigation. It's more intutive and easier to use.
For editng/updating heavy interfaces, Ajax makes a lot of sense.
