Ajax will die

Now that I have your attention, it’s not Ajax that will die, it’s the term that will.

When Jesse James Garret coined the term Ajax, it was meant to describe a set of technologies that have already existed for several years: XHTML and CSS for standards-based presentation, DOM for dynamic display in the browser, data exchange using XML, and JavaScript to glue them. But now, developers may use JSON or HTML instead of XML, use libraries that hide the complexity of XMLHttpRequest, or not even use JavaScript at all (e.g. Rails RJS templates).

More importantly, we now see Ajax as an architecture. From defining a page for every functionality, we now think in terms of small requests to the server and manipulating parts of the page, instead of changing the whole page. And all the requests and updates happen in the background, with little user intervention. As I compose this post using Gmail, it is continually saving it while at the same time checking on the status of people in my contact list.

In a few years, the Ajax architecture will become the web architecture and everyone would expect that this is just how the web works.

Die “Ajax”! Die!