Posted on Tuesday 6 December 2005 - Popularity: unranked
SWiK is a great site for all AJAX developers and everyone that wants to become one someday. One of the best parts of the site is a list of what to avoid when programming in AJAX. Many of the points are valid for non-AJAX web applications as well, so even non-AJAX devs should have a look.
Here are the current (it’s a collaborative effort) tips: Breaking the back button, not giving immediate visual cues for clicking widgets, leaving offline people behind, don’t make me wait for Ajax, sending sensitive information in the clear, assuming AJAX development is single platform development, too much code makes the browser slow, not having a plan for those who do not enable or have JavaScript, inventing new UI conventions, changing state with links (GET requests), blinking and changing parts of the page unexpectedly, not using links I can pass to friends or bookmark, not cascading local changes to other parts of the page, asynchronously performing batch operations, scrolling the page and making me lose my place, blocking spidering, character sets, don’t abuse standards, problem reporting, return on investment, mimicking browser page navigation behavior imperfectly and huge documents using AJAX for loading several pages without reloading.
