uptoeleven's Journal: lordy I have a fan

I have a fan!
Lordy!
And he has a R E A L L Y low ID number!
Hi David!
Cheers for liking the nonsense I spout.

Anyway. Today I posted on one of my pet subjects - the technology-formerly-known-as-"kind of like dhtml without full html responses, maybe using XML and javascript and stuff like that in a hideous knitted mess of obfuscation"-latterly-known-as-AJAX

IMO AJAX only rocks because it's getting so much hype but has been possible for so long. Most of us who have struggled with DHTML have known about it for years. The following usually happened:

1.) Realise what DHTML can do and rave about it to anyone and anything that will listen.
2.) Rave and rave and rave and rave etc.
3.) To shut you up someone gives you a project that would be easy in flash and could technically be done in dhtml - so you rise to the bait.
4.) Code for months.
5.) Submit something that doesn't really work, is a pig to maintain muttering about how the paradigm doesn't necessarily live up to the promise and slunk away in a huff.
6.) Don't get any more DHTML work.

Alternatively you decided to implement the DHTMLAPI and watched browsers the world over commit suicide everytime they see your site.

Also get annoyed when people start nicking your code then flaming you cos it isn't easily nicked (no shit sherlock).

There were probably invisible frames and iframes involved.

Anyway, most of us decided that the technology wasn't quite ready yet, forgot about it, moved on to bigger and better stuff - server side coding and the like. I got into Java and more recently PHP - others went to .NET, coldfusion, whatever. Either way, suddenly, someone has thought "hey, we got a bit of browser convergence, we got a bit of common sense coming in the way servers send out responses, we have loads of RSS which is XML driven anyway, lets reheat that weird dhtml-talking-asynchronously-to-servers thing and name it after a cleaning fluid".

And since Vim and Bold were already reserved (and Arial is kind of like a font, and Persil is just... well it works as well as Fairy would have - I'm coding in Fairy today... anyway) so AJAX was born.

AJAX - a seamless client-server interaction - where does the server stop and the client begin - the one can do the job of the other - it's like total-web. It ought to win a world cup but never quite make it due to internal divisions and implementation disagreements. Total-web, total-football, ajax? OK whatever. Anyway, it's here and everyone who told you to piss off with your fancy-dan dhtml ideas is falling over themselves to implement it and - hey you know all about these sorts of things how come YOU didn't think about doing something like this, I mean it's so simple etc. etc. I hate project managers.

Moo

[Chacham]

Wow, that is a low UID. :)

er, Hi.

[David Rolfe]

Hello to you, too.

:-) I don't recall exactly, but I probably 'friended' you some time around here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=160710&cid=134 62549 [slashdot.org] (or somesuch similar post). I'm a huge fan of physics and science and find little use for the kind of dogma that floats around in politics these days. I'm an ally to anyone that insists that public policy should address science on science's terms. It's pompous (and illogical) for zealots, politicians or economists to counter all climate science (and