Stop Using Ajax! (Not 2.0)

. . . and I have more to say about the use of AJAX!

Often, I am called in to work on a web application that has existed for a long while. The application may suffer from poor usability as well as inaccessibility. My job may be to extend the functionality by constructing a new component. However, even after I have done my work, large parts of the application remain as they were.

In these cases, not matter what I do, the application will remain inaccessible to some users. In such a case, I use AJAX with no compunction. I can improve the usability and responsiveness of an application immeasurably.

The government of Canada has hundreds of applications that are used every day by civil servants across the country. These applications were developed using old style ASP – or straight JSP running on Tomcat – and old style HTML. Many of these applications do not use CSS at all. Often, they can only be viewed using IE. (Many departments still use IE 6.) Yet these applications represent an investment of hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars each, plus training and maintenance.

What’s more, many of these applications were build by people who knew how to build web pages but did not understand how to build applications. I am not blaming anyone. It is what it is. These applications can be confusing, if only because each developer was reinventing the wheel.

By introducing tab controls, short-cut keys and and accordion controls, I reduce the cost of training and support, and deliver a user experience that takes advantage of what people already know about using the typical desktop application. By refreshing sections of the page selectively rather than reloading the whole page, I can avoid breaking the concentration and flow of the user. This is not a bad thing.

Don’t get me wrong. The Government of Canada takes accessibility seriously. Check out the guidelines I need to be familiar with. Still, you have to know that I often work with applications that were build long before these guidelines were devised. The work may take a while.

AJAX has its place. I might even suggest that the GOL guidelines I refer to above could be expanded or amended to include web applications. The web application is a different beast. It is not a web page, or a site composed of a series of pages. The so-called “page” is a bad metaphor. There should be a separate standard for the common look and feel of web applications used by the government of Canada, but that’s another issue.