"ajax" in Weblog

.Net magazine asked me (amongst dozens of others) to give them my predictions for next year. The article’s now out and I feel a little bit mis-represented - they seem to have missed my point entirely. To set the record straight here’s what I wrote for them:

I think that next year is going to be incredibly exciting for interaction and user experience design. Right now we are seeing the reinvention of the web application. AJAX has been met with rabid enthusiasm and Dale Dougherty’s Web 2.0 label has crossed over into the mainstream press.

Microsoft recently announced that they will be moving Office online and unveiled live.com to tap the online services market. Google has already made its intentions clear with service offerings like GMail, Google Maps and Google Reader. Yahoo! has entered the fray with some very interesting experiments in user experience, Flickr being my favourite but Yahoo! Mindset is an ingeniously simple enhancement to organic searching. Then throw delicious, Basecamp, Listal, Remember the Milk, Sproutliner, Netvibes, Technorati, Num Sum, Writely, Rojo, ProtoPage, TiddlyWiki and all the other independent apps into the mix. Finally, add the new or forthcoming offerings from high profile web designers like 37 Signals, Adaptive Path, Firewheel Design and Shaun Inman as they establish themselves as application developers. Everyone seems to have a web app in the oven. That’s a very rich and diverse online platform in the making…

These applications require more intense workflows than anything we’ve seen before on the web. I expect to see masses of experimental interaction accompanying new and existing web apps in the name of user experience while everyone figures out what works and what doesn’t. If anything, I think the high end Flash designers probably have a head start, having dealt with interaction issues like latency and interface feedback before. I am looking forward to plenty of experimentation in rich interaction with some blazing successes that change how we use the web but many, many dismal, unusable failures.

Unobtrusive Javascript is the old big thing. AJAX is the new big thing. Both are BIG right now. But a rather crucial question seems to have been missed… How do the various accessibility devices actually deal with Javascript?

Prompted by an interesting article by Derek Featherstone: JavaScript and Accessibility, I posted a question to Bob Easton over at Access Matters. I’m not sure whether I’ll be part of it yet but hopefully there will be some interesting test results forthcoming.

The rest of the discussion on JavaScript and Accessibility is facinating, with Brothercake explaining the importance of the question incredibly well.

I know I’ve been quiet for a while but this is why: Fixing the Back Button and Enabling Bookmarking for AJAX Apps. It’s been a couple of weeks in the writing and researching but I’m hoping it’s going to be popular. I don’t really know how to release this one though. For my CSS articles I knew that CSS-D is the place to go. This new one coveres usability, AJAX, javascript and maybe general web development… I guess I’ll just have to leave it and see what happens.

I first saw Bitflux’s LiveSearch last year when Colly implemented it on CollyLogic. I thought it was very cool but didn’t think much more about it. When Google Suggest came out I was impressed again - it’s an incredibly clever feature, but I still couldn’t see the protential of this no-refresh approach. Now Google Maps, on the other hand, along with a few other similar apps has really got me thinking… Web functionality becomes far more like an APPLICATION as soon as you take the browser out of the equation. Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications by JJG is a great intro and I think it may have persuaded my current employer to give it a go. Fingers crossed.