Saturday, September 24, 2005

All of the blogsphere arguments about the use of the term AJAX in the last couple of months has been driving me nuts. It's not that I really care, one way or the other, about the use of the term. What's been bothering me is the this is becoming another one of those dogmatic battles that just wastes people's time. And, yes, I understand that I can avoid wasting my own time by not reading the rants - and I don't. However, the rants are typically in my virtual path, and there's nothing I can do to avoid having to wade through them. I just don't understand these arguments. First of all, for those that insist on reminding everyone that "AJAX is just a stupid buzzword for something I've been doing for years", I have the following to say. It's a term. Terms are good. They help us communicate. This one helps us search for information about what others are doing with a particular design pattern. It's now a pretty useful tag to search with, as witnessed by using it on any of the social bookmarking sites out there (such as: http://www.blinklist.com/tag/ajax/ or http://www.technorati.com/tags/ajax). Secondly, for those that insist that AJAX is a "new and spiffy approach to web development", I simply say: No it is not. But then again, who cares? Now that I've contributed to the problem, I vote for everyone getting back to work.