Some thoughts about Web 2.0 and why it really isn’t that shiny
Hey there,
so the web2.0 is taking over now, right? Lots of AJAX and who knows what else… I mean there sure are some nice features there that allow for hell of a lot new things in web-development. Honestly I’m not a big fan of this stuff. I didn’t try doing it yet, but as I don’t like creating web-apps in general, I’m already sure that I wouldn’t like it too much.
But there’s also another reason why I absolutely hate this AJAX here and AJAX there thingy… This AJAX is totally messing with the typical browser-workflow that every user got used to. Things like nicely animated pictures popups like those on apple.com (try the gallery in the lower part if you don’t know what I mean). These pictures pop up like windows, but they are no windows. They have a close box like windows, but they are no windows. If I hit cmd-w, because I’m so used to using shortcuts, I close the window. But wait. These pictures were no windows, right? I knew that. I mean…I saw that, and my brains recognized it. But somehow this didn’t get through to my fingers, and instead of the right hand moving the mouse to the close-box, which takes insanely long, the left hand just pressed cmd-w to speed up the process. When I watched these pictures it happend to me that I had to go to Safari’s history menu about 4-5 times to reopen this window, but I just kept hitting cmd-w instead of clicking this close box.
Another thing I noticed just some minutes ago. Daring Fireball blogged about Alex Payne’s c4[1] coverage which is pretty detailed (thx for that). So I visited Alex’ blog. I noticed there’re quite a lot of posts about c4 and I wanted to see if there’re more posts on his blog about this. So I hit the older posts button and zap, I saw the older posts. What I didn’t notice in first place was that not a new page was loaded, but instead somehow magically the whole page was just replaced with the other content. I mean, do you really need to do it that way? The back and forward button doesn’t work with this feature, the browser history doesn’t work with this feature, heck I have to scroll down the whole page to get to this newer posts link.
Come on people, do you really need to use too much AJAX? Don’t you think that less still can be more? As I said I have no idea of this AJAX stuff, so maybe it helps a lot in creating websites and makes things easier. But only for you guys to have an easier job, don’t let all the crap rain down to the user who has to deal with user-interfaces that don’t work out nicely in the end.
Just my 2 cents
Karsten