[Update 2026: It is quaint to look back on my take here as now we have libraries like React, Angular, and Vue and a world of Chrome only websites—Especially in enterprise software. Front end development has become a complex mess again and it’s really sad to see. Even without javascript, CSS has expanded so much as well. I really have not kept up with things as I am focused more on strategy and research now-a-days. Now folks are using AI to build things and I can only imaging the mess of the code behind.

Update 2011: OK, so back in 2005 I was skeptical of AJAX. At the time you needed to truly be able to write javascript in order to deal with the browser compatibility issues. The situation with the GAP site failing was a major foobar on their part and showed how much effort it took to do AJAX appropriately with things like graceful degradation. Today of course we have one of the most awesome libraries in jQuery. Which handles all the nastiness of browser problems for the most part. Today it is possible to do things with jQuery that really lead to fantastic interaction experiences. There are many other fine JS libraries and frameworks, but jQuery has really solved the problem in a way that simplifies and yet still provides powerful control to the designer/developer.]

Original Article:
Recently, I’ve had conversations with a few of my developer friends who are all a twitter about AJAX. Saying how great it is and all the cool things Google is doing with it. Honestly, after taking a real close look at it, I find it to be hardly more than another buzzword. It simply does not offer anything of real value for web development. Yes, it can make interfacing with certain web applications smoother, and it solves some problems inherent in web applications. However, it introduces a whole set of other problems, that in my opinion, make it widely unsuitable for most work.

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