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Wednesday’s conversation with Fry provoked me to think more about where and when to use AJAX. I thought I’ve got it figured it out, but I’ve discovered that my opinions don’t really match my behavior and I find this a problem.

AJAX rage of 2005 hasn’t brought many articles exploring benefits and downsides to AJAX. There were few, even very good ones, but I’d like to see more of them and less articles describing latest gimmick or service which would probably be overlooked if it didn’t use an AJAX trick or two.

I had a dentist appointment today, something I’m sure everyone looks forward to, which at least provided me with ample time to think about this. My basic premise was that we should use technology that already works and use AJAX to build on top of that.

Since basic web model has been around for a long time, is well understood and mostly works, I tried to look at places where it doesn’t or at least not as it should and came to a short list of possible criteria for choosing when to apply AJAX:

• Browsers ought to support this, but mostly can’t or don’t. Example: autosave support for textarea, which is the most requested feature among my friends.
• Browsers support it, but badly. Example: progress bar for uploads. I don’t know why you can get a usable dialog for downloads, but you’re out of luck if you want to upload.
• Connection problems (narrow bandwidth or high latency). If this is a known, but otherwise unsolvable problem, AJAX can be used to reduce ammount and frequency of traffic.

Have I forgot anything else?

I don’t think these are only valid scenarios for AJAX use, but we did discover that fast serving of well designed pages greatly reduces the need for AJAX.

One of the downsides of running your own company is that you have to get familiar with things you could never care for and amazingly often make sense only to really twisted bureaucratic minds.

In Slovenia, if you collect personal information of any kind, you have to register such database 15 days before its first use with Inspectorate for Personal Data Protection . I’m all in favor of laws protecting personal information and in general I think Slovenian laws are not too bad in that regard. But if inspectorate by their own words rarely inspects cases that weren’t reported to them and all such inspections seem to be limited to state institutions, what good is such register than anyway? How does it protect anyone?

You can read online a list of companies that registered their databases together with a short summary of what kind of data they collect and what for. I’ve checked a company where I administered such database for two and a half years (never experienced an inspection of any kind) and it’s quite clear that no one actually checks if provided information is true or complete.

What you’re left with is another meaningless obligation you have to fulfill. Preferably by sending them email with data AND a printed form (email only is not allowed). Nice. You can do more work so they don’t have to.

E-government Slovenian style.