Man, it’s taken me over a week to write about this. Slacker extrodinaire. Anyway, I got up very early indeed last Friday morning and made my way across the country to the Victoria Park Plaza Hotel for Clearleft‘s Ajax Workshop. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, but what I got was very good indeed.

So the Clearleft crew took a bunch of web designers and developers and threw them together in a room. I had a few wierd moments where I looked around and recognised various faces from my travels around Flickr and the blogosphere [1]. I also felt ever so slightly jealous as a variety of Powerbooks were unfurled onto the desks around me.

Jeremy Keith spent the morning taking us through Javascript, DOM Scripting, the basics of Ajax and how it’s done (JSON looked particularly interesting). If you’re scratching your head and asking “WTF is Ajax, man?” Suffice it to say that it lets you refresh only the parts of the page that you want to, rather than fetching a whole new page from the server every time a user clicks a button.

All good stuff, but not the main reason he had gathered us there at all. No, that came after lunch:

Hijax

Hijax is a best practise methodology for building web applications. It basically says:

• Build your pages in a completely modular fashion.
• Build it such that it will work for users without Javascript enabled.
• Add the AJAX functionality in once you’ve got the pages working without it.
• Only add the AJAX in once you’ve thought very carefully about the usability and accessibility issues involved with them.

It takes it’s name from the fact that you hijack the default actions of a web page and bend them to your will. Clever huh? Jeremy does a much better job of explaining it, so I’ll leave the rest to him. One more comment though: When Google built GMail (one of Ajax’s poster children), they delivered a complete Ajax application first, then months later managed to produce a completely separate plain HTML version. They had to do all of the work twice: If they’d done it the Hijax way, they could have had both versions of GMail at once and in the same application. Makes you think, doesn’t it?

Ajax: The downside

Ajax is a fantastic technology which has far reaching implications across the web. However, it has some major issues: Usability and Accessibility to name but two.

Say the user clicks a button and something updates elsewhere on the page. How do we inform them that something happened? There’s a number of answers to this question: Animations and special effects are just two of them. But what if they have a low-resolution screen, they’re using big fonts, or they’ve simply scrolled too far, leaving the vital animation or effect off-screen? What about screen-reader users – how do you tell them that only part of the screen has updated?

Then there are the problems with bookmarking and the back-button. In a traditional web application, every move you make is added to the browser history. Ajax apps suffer many of the same issues as Flash and Frames-based sites: Because you aren’t refreshing the page every time, you aren’t updating the browser history. Hitting back will likely take you right out of the app and bookmarking simply doesn’t work. Jeremy’s answer was that if the user felt the need to bookmark, maybe you’re changing too much of the with page using Ajax?

There is currently no clear answer to to a lot of these issues, but a lot of good work is going on in that direction. Recent work by the likes of Mike Stenhouse and Robert Nyman is showing us the way. Some people are advocating that we should get screen-reader users to disable Javascript. Others disagree and say that improved software will come in time. I share the latter point of view – besides, what about those in-between cases, like low-res screens, big fonts, mobile users and so on? There’s definitely lots to think about when you’re putting together Ajax apps.

Coffee Break!

On top of all this, I found the time to chat to the likes of Adam (from the DiH mailinglist), Molly, Mike and Paul about IE7, it’s implications and how Microsoft are changing, then later to Jeremy, Bruce and others about haircuts, earrings, Flickr and social networking.

After the workshop, we all trudged upstrairs to the hotel bar and indulged in a couple of beers. At some point my sister, Alice, phoned me and demanded that I go and see her. We met up with Angus and dined in a very good turkish restaurant, before hooking up with various friends of hers for the evening. I think we left Tru Thoughts @ Cargo at about 3:30am. A long day, but a good-un.

Oooh, that got a bit stream-of-consciousness there for a while didn’t it?

[1] Did I just write “blogosphere”? Gaaah… shudder.