Kevin Burton’s NEW FeedBlog

I don’t know why bad Ajax makes me so frustrated but man it does. Maybe it’s another form of insanity.

Web 1.0 could really be difficult to use. Bad forms, no auto-completion, round-trips to the server, etc. The problem is bad Ajax in Web 2.0 is such a huge step backwards. Web 0.5 if you will.

Take Microsoft’s Live.com for example. At the Syndicate conference I was nice and pointed out a few bugs to the Microsoft team. They fixed them by making them worse and just plain inaccessible.

They’re not links. They’re fake ajax ‘on click’ handlers which trap both the left and right mouse buttons. The Live.com team tricks the user and makes them look like links when in fact they’re not.

Want to use tabbed browsing or maybe open up the link in a new window? Can’t. Blind and want to navigate the links with your screen reader? Can’t do that either since they’re not real links. Want to bookmark a page? Can’t do that either.

It doesn’t stop there though. Live.com seem to be so excited that they can do something in Ajax that they neglected to ask if they should.

I can continue.

The link title’s on their RSS items? Yeah. They’re not links either. In fact they behave differently than other links in the Live.com system in that they’re toggles. They toggle the visibility of the item below that. You’d never know of course because the style of the link is identical to other links.

It doesn’t stop there. They’re real A elements. The problem is that they link to documents that aren’t there.

For example the first link to a story on Forbes.com (which I can’t link to because this thing doesn’t have permalinks) has a URLs of:

http://www.live.com/b.htm?%20http://www.forbes.com/feeds/2005/12/09/most-expensive-movies_cx_lr_1209mostexpensive.html_partner=rss

Go ahead and load that. I’ll wait.

Yup! Isn’t that beautiful? What do you see? All nice and white. Now imagine I had copied and pasted that to a family member via IM.

The page returns HTTP 200 and contains one line of javascript (which doesn’t do anything).

They even have UI elements that appear to be have no use whatsoever. They actually have a hide/show toggle at the top right. Click hide and the center of the window will vanish. Are they for real? What’s the point here?

The whole point of Ajax is to make the web easier to use. Not to move us back in time.

Live.com is one of those products you won’t use but it’s still annoying to know that it exists.

Microsoft is throwing a lot of users at this thing (alexa graph). It’s really sad.

If you guys can’t build a Web 2.0 product maybe it’s time to buy instead of build. I guess I just shot my chances in flipping to Microsoft (but maybe that’s for the best).