I’m probably a bit late blogging about the whole web 2.0 ‘phenomenon/hype’ but thought, hey its my blog I can do what the hell I want! So what’s web 2.0? Well from what I’ve seen its basically AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) and pages built to use them. AJAX basically allows content within a page to be dynamically changed, now this isn’t anything new, anyone can show and hide DIV’s and layers to make it seem like the page is doing something but AJAX allows the one webpage to send off requests to server side scripts, who then send the reply back and load it into the original page without any refreshing or reloading. Basically using this sort of method you could build a site with as much content as wikipedia.org that only had one page.
So this all sounds very interesting but just how far should anyone go with building AJAX based sites? Well firstly ill look at the SEO implications, and its not a pretty picture. If for example wikipedia.org decided to run from one single page, calling in all the content using AJAX then what would a search engine see? Well not a lot, as a menu link rather than being
a href=’http://www’
Which would call the next page and be spider friendly would be a javascript function such as
a onclick=’get_new(content)’
Which then sends a request off to the javascript which sends a request to the server side script to get whatever content is required, then brings it back to the javascript which then updates the page and inserts the content.
Now from a user point of view this looks fantastic, you make your requests, click links fill out forms etc then you get some nice graphic come up (usually an animated GIF) while the AJAX executes and gets the content and then its loaded right before your eyes. What’s a search engine see? Nothing, it cant execute the javascript function to load the next page so all it sees is the original homepage, so if the homepage simply said “welcome to wikipedia” then that’s all the search engine would see. Its basically a bit like flash based sites, they may look great but they’re really not very search engine friendly. So to SEO an AJAX based site, well its not going to be much fun, all the fundamentals such as strong titles, header tags, meta tags, on page content all means nothing as it changes through javascript functions, and in a search engines eyes, doesn’t change.
Usability wise I cant fault it if used right. Changing from one page to another it seems wasted but for things that sometimes take a while to complete it can be very good. So for example comparison sites, and ill use travelsupermarket as an example, they compare hotel prices based on criteria entered, now each of the merchants they compare return results at different speeds depending on their own system. Now the last thing a travelsupermarket user want is to have to stare at a blank “we are searching please wait” page so using AJAX they bring results back as they get them. So if merchant 1 returns results in 2 seconds these are shown to the user straight away but the user still knows they are searching and can wait a little longer, then a few seconds later another merchant returns results, these are filtered in and it continues. So a merchant with a very slow response time doesn’t look travelsupermarket their user, it’s the users choice to wait, or click on an existing result.
Accessibility, most people can use it. I know some people will say that 0.2% (made up figure) of people don’t have javascript enabled on their browser but basically balls to them. The web will move forward and this is one step, if some people are desperate to keep their security settings on ‘stupid’ then fine, but they’ll have to accept that some sites wont work.
All in all, I think AJAX is great if used right. Its not ideal for page navigation and id never use it for that, but image galleries, comparing things, anything that you want to do dynamically within a page it has huge advantages. And if you’ve never seen all this in action, post a comment - its AJAX powered ill have you know!
