Blackmoor Vituperative

One of my recent projects will be using JavaScript, DOM, XMLHttpRequest, and a few other techniques in order to provide close-to-real-time feedback to the user. While doing some research on the subject, I ran across a re-reaction to the negative reaction that some folks have had to the name by which this technique has recently come to be known: “Ajax“.

On the one hand, I can certainly sympathize with people who are vexed by the creation of a new buzzword to describe something that has been known by other names for years (“carjacking”, for example, has always irked me, and “splatbook” still causes me to twitch involuntarily every time I hear the word). On the other hand, I had never bothered working with XMLHttpRequest in my projects, mainly because I didn’t know much about it and didn’t realize how nifty it was. It was only when someone at work mentioned using “Ajax” for a project that I started to look into it. So, was a new term needed? No. But has the creation of a new term aided awareness and proliferation of the technique? In my experience, it has, and I can’t argue with that.