Ajax Hacks

Foreword

The truth is, I’ve never built an Ajax application.

Sure, I’ve worked on Ajax projects. But when it comes to programming, my experience is pretty limited. I’ve done some JavaScripting here and there. I know a little Perl, but hardly enough to build a web application. As a programmer, I’m more of an occasional weekend hobbyist than anything else.

You can imagine how frustrating it is for people to learn this fact when they send me emails asking for help with their JavaScript. But you can hardly fault them for expecting me to be a technologist. After all, I wrote an article coining the term “Ajax,” and Ajax is all about technology, right?

The funny thing is that I didn’t see it that way when I was writing the essay. I didn’t think I was writing for technologists at all. I’m a designer, and I thought I was writing for a design audience. If you look at some of the other things we’ve published on adaptivepath.com, you can see that we’re much more likely to be talking about ways to analyze user behavior or make an experience connect with people than about the latest code libraries or data schemas.

That’s one reason some people thought it was a little strange for me to be writing about Ajax at all. Designers, one way of thinking goes, should leave writing about technology to technologists.

But seeing Ajax as a purely technological phenomenon misses the point. If anything, Ajax is even more of a sea change for designers than it is for developers. Sure, there are a lot of ways in which ...