March 7, 2005: OK, about this ajax thing... I've seen a few posts implying that Adaptive Path is trying to claim ownership of something they didn't invent, but c'mon: there's no way AP is going to "own" something this ubiquitous. What Jesse has done, however, is to establish AP as a company that is responsive to new developments in web application technology and demonstrate that the company is able to articulate the value of those developments. Not surprising that AP would be so positioned, since this has always been one of Jeff's talents; he is brilliant at describing what's going on at the intersection of business, technology, and design. You can complain that that doesn't produce anything of value, but I strongly disagree. There is great power in explaining, in popularizing, and in naming.

Which brings me to the name "Ajax." I've also seen complaints that it is a bad name because it's "owned" by a company that produces soap. To those people, I'd like to point out first that we're not trying to name a company, so we can call it whatever we want; there's no one to sue. And second, that there's a little poem called the Iliad which used the name a few years before Colgate-Palmolive.

What I thought was a more interesting critique came from Rajat, who pointed out that the name has everything to do with the technology and nothing really to do with the experience. In fact, it's actively misleading wrt the experience, since the effect is one of syncronousness (i.e. responsiveness). But maybe this is due to the idea that the UI designer is an ambassador or translator between human and machine (I know very few (no?) successful interface designers who don't know at least significantly more than the average person about the way the code they deal with functions). The trouble comes when UI designers move too far from the interface and think too much in human or machine terms. On one side they lose effectiveness when they can't push developers to find technical solutions that support the UE. On the other side, they forget that the technology is a means and fall into the trap of thinking in terms of "best practices."

To end a rambling post, let me just say phooey to "best practices." That way mediocrity lies.