Ajax isn’t progress, it’s actually a step back.

Most people have been happy to actually use some sane advanced language for doing web sites. There is Java, JSP, PHP, Ruby, Python, Perl, …

And then there is Ajax. One of the main components is JavaScript. That language most of us would have loved to forget. Forever.

Ajax brings you back into the dark ages of internet development, with browser incompatibilities, it features memory leaks, and many Ajax apps (such as live.com) will run unbearably slow on older computers. Such as my 1.8 GHz P4M laptop. If they work at all - live.com just shows “Loading…” for me right now.

Have you ever looked at some of the actual Ajax code?

This isn’t the future, this is the dark ages coming back!

[MJ Ray replies that I didn’t mention accessibility issues with Ajax. That’s true; I’m aware of them, but this post focuses on Ajax doing away with all the advances in programming languages and software engineering… The in-accessibility of Ajax stuff is worth an own blog post sometime]