Web 2.0 technologies (e.g. Ajax)

[NickFitz]

Pageflakes Limited
30 Farringdon Street
London, London EC4A 4HJ
United Kingdom

if anybody wants to pop some fish heads and maggots through their letterbox on the way home

[dang65]

How do you get the Sky guide thingie to give you the listing for one channel like the old one did?

You clicked on the channel you were interested in & you got the day's worth of programming...

Please help an Old Lizard with this important problem...

Have you tried clicking on the "List" tab? That allows you to pick one channel only and see what's on in blocks of about 6 hours at a time (click "Earlier" or "Later" to get different blocks).

EDIT: Actually, you can pick "All Day" in the "Time of day" box at the top. That should do the trick.

[Moscow Mule]

A good case in point.

So is iGoogle better than Google?

Is the new fangled BBC portal better than the old site?


No.

In my opinion, igoogle is much better than google as I can use it as an RSS feed aggregator at work.

I also quite like the BBC portal.

Pageflakes looks a complete dogs dinner.

[VectraMan]

So does Ajax define Web 2.0 then? I've never quite worked out what "Web 2.0" really meant, other than some vague description about non static content, which sounds a lot like the thing I'm using now (and forums were around long before Tim Berners Lee did his thing).

So what makes a site a Web 2.0 one?

[dang65]

So what makes a site a Web 2.0 one?

Well, they're just more dynamic and personalised instead of static HTML. That sort of thing has been around for ages, via server-side scripting and databases and forums and so on, but the Web 2.0 thing comes in more when page content changes without reloads. Like when select box content changes as you fill in a form, or maps load as you drag around Google Maps, or TV channels and programmes load as you scroll through the Sky TV listings.

That sort of thing.

There's the usual moaning articles from "usability consultants", but life would be a bit dull if we'd all stayed with Jakob Nielsen's recommendations ten years ago.

[VectraMan]

Like when select box content changes as you fill in a form, or maps load as you drag around Google Maps, or TV channels and programmes load as you scroll through the Sky TV listings.

So exactly the sort of thing that desktop apps, or Flash, or Java, or plugins were doing 10 years ago but given a fancy new name?

Good old IT - let's keep recycling the same concepts and getting paid over and over again for it.

[kali]

So exactly the sort of thing that desktop apps, or Flash, or Java, or plugins were doing 10 years ago but given a fancy new name?

Good old IT - let's keep recycling the same concepts and getting paid over and over again for it.

WHS

It's one of my bugbears... .NET is another case in point, does nothing that couldn't be done before with old-school technologies. Purely another MS business case.

[DimPrawn]

My gripes with most "ajax" sites are....


1. All the asynchronous calls bog down the site.
2. It's not intuitive that I might have to hover over a picture or drag one element to another or that some widget is going to pop-up if I right click something etc.
3. The URL does not change as I navigate the site. From a useability point of view this is bad and from a SEO point of view it is commercial suicide.
4. There is no standard. A link might be activated by a mouseover, maybe a click, maybe a drag.
5. Anyone using a screen reader, or requires a large font or with disabilities is fooked.
6. It works with some browsers and not others.

Overall, a big turn off.

[dang65]

So exactly the sort of thing that desktop apps, or Flash, or Java, or plugins were doing 10 years ago but given a fancy new name?

Sort of. But I suspect you'd find the web of ten years ago incredibly flat and dull when you're used to Google Maps, YouTube, LastFM, eBay, BBC iPlayer, online banking and the sort of Ajax interaction which you don't even notice because you're so used to it now. And before broadband most of that technology you mention was verging on useless even if it existed.

[NickFitz]

My gripes with most "ajax" sites are....


1. All the asynchronous calls bog down the site.
2. It's not intuitive that I might have to hover over a picture or drag one element to another or that some widget is going to pop-up if I right click something etc.
3. The URL does not change as I navigate the site. From a useability point of view this is bad and from a SEO point of view it is commercial suicide.
4. There is no standard. A link might be activated by a mouseover, maybe a click, maybe a drag.
5. Anyone using a screen reader, or requires a large font or with disabilities is fooked.
6. It works with some browsers and not others.

Overall, a big turn off.

1. Due to incompetence - most so-called web developers don't even understand the basics of HTTP, let alone have any proper understanding of asynchronous client-server architecture;
2. Poor UI design - again, due mainly to the developers being unfit for purpose;
3. More poor UI design - as a general rule, a meaningful static state for the application (as opposed to, say, stage 3 of some process which makes no sense to bookmark) should be clearly identifiable, and retrieveable, by a unique URL;
4. Poor UI design again - there are conventions, and just because it is possible to circumvent them doesn't mean that it's a good thing to do so;
5. More incompetence - there is absolutely no reason for a web application not to be accessible: progressive enhancement is the key here;
6. Guess what... more incompetence, and once again the correct use of progressive enhancement is the solution.

All excellent points, summarising just about all of the problems commonly found in the wild