I don’t know if David Temkin is going to induce the same shock as the crowd in an HM Bateman cartoon, but he’s gone and said that Ajax might not be ready for primetime. What a relief someone’s said it.

As soon as Google produced GMail and Google Suggest and Google Maps they raised the bar of the web interface. But when Jesse James Garrett named it Ajax (Asynchronous Javascript And XML) the on-line world went wild. Or rather, the people paid to talk about the on-line world did. “At last,” they seemed to be saying, “now that we’ve got a name for it we can really talk it up.”

David says:

And just to state the obvious, lest we forget: HTML as a standard for Web applications is in a precarious position, with the leading browser vendor actively working to define its own all-new markup language for networked applications, and other browser vendors creating a splinter group that diverges from the W3C to promote their own standards for Web applications.

Thank you, David. It’s much more difficult to get cross-browser compatibility than with that than with Flash, Java or Laszlo. And - when new browsers appear - it’s much more fragile.

I’m still waiting for a standard Ajax library. Not an Ajax library, but a standard Ajax library. Then I’ll be convinced.

Update: Just as one person throws a pebble to knock the Ajax wall down, so a corporation makes a move to build it up. Sun have jumped on the Ajax bandwagon with a document or two on J2EE and Ajax. (Others here.) Grrr. But to their credit they cite the disadvantages clearly: “Complexity… Standardization of the XMLHttpRequest Object… JavaScript Implementations… Debugging… Viewable Source”. I’d say that was almost the definition of a hopeless development environment.