Its been almost two years since Ajax exploded onto the web, with more and more sites adopting it for pretty much everything. In my view, one of the defining things about 2006 has been the maturity of Ajax as a web technology. Frameworks such as Dojo and Prototype have came a long way, facilitating JavaScript development and offering out-of-the can functionality. We have also seen many hosted applications such as Yahoo Mail and .Mac using Ajax to enhance the user experience available, and we are getting to the stage where this kind of functionality is also cropping up in other web applications, from e-commerce to social networks.If 2005 was the time when geeks were going wild with the technology, 2006 has been the year where developers have sat down and thought “How can I best use this to create a better website?”, and this has really helped Ajax to break into the mainstream.To compliment this, we have seen some great strides in the tools available to the developer, in particular, browser extensions such as Firebug which really are a godsend when it comes to testing and debugging applications.Of course its not all good, we are seeing one bad side effect of this Ajax explosion - page bloat. Using the Prototype library adds about 50kb to the page weight, Dojo can add as much as 300kb (especially as very few people seem use the include system). Obviously, if you are building a JavaScript heavy application then this is justifiably, but I do see a lot of sites which use frameworks specifically for a single piece of functionality, such as the $ function or a single visual effect. In these cases, we need a way of stripping down our JavaScript libraries based upon the functionality we, the page authors, require.Thankfully, for 2007 it looks as though there is a solution for this, in the form of JS Linker. A Java application which analyzes your code and removes JavaScript functions which are not used. Although its currently in its early stages, this one is worth keeping an eye on.Another such tool to watch is Flash Aid, which uses Flash in order to solve a big challenge faced by Ajax developers - using JavaScript alone, there is no way of knowing if someone is using a screen reader, and thus you cannot offer screen reader specific content/functionality to boost the accessibility of your site. Flash Aid, developed by Jeremy Keith and Aral Balkan, is a small piece of Flash which sits invisibly on your page. It allows JavaScript to check if a screen reader is present, using the built-in API’s within Flash.So, 2005 had lots of developers getting excited, 2006 put a bit more structure around this and presented us with some new challenges (many of which we discover have been faced by the Flash community for years - we can look there for inspiration and potential solutions) and plenty of opportunities for innovation. Here’s to a happy 2007 for the Ajax community! (more…)

In January, if someone asked me what I thought about Flash then I would have probably slated it. Now at the end of the year I find myself tinkering with ActionScript 3.0 and appreciating it as a platform upon which rich internet applications can be built. Perhaps more than Ajax, 2006 has been a great year for the Flash platform.On the technology side, June saw the release of Flex and Flash Player 9 - giving developers a very flexible and refined programming language in the form of ActionScript 3.0 and a set of components specifically designed for creating web applications. We have also witnessed the explosion of Flash Video, helped by the popularity of sites such as MySpace and YouTube. As a result, Flash is now the number one technology for video distribution over the web, and adoption of newer versions of the player has been increased significantly.On the creative side we are now past the stage where we have Flash-based intro animations for sites, and totally Flash-centric micro-sites also appear to be on the decline. Instead we are seeing Flash being used as part of progressive enhancement, often in conjunction with traditional HTML content. More and more, I’m seeing pages which I’m not even sure if something is HTML or Flash - I like that feeling, and I think it makes the technology much less intrusive, which in turn makes for a more compelling user experience. A good example of this is on the Sony Ericsson website. Designers are finally starting to realize that Flash is not the answer to everything, there are things that Flash is really good for and things where it is better to stick with HTML/CSS.Moving into 2007, what’s next? I can see Flex (really I mean ActionScript 3.0) being used across the Web and even more examples of Flash and Ajax working together to create great experiences and solve common problems.I’d like to see advances in how search engines interact with Flash content - one of the number one challenges for anyone who is building Flash websites is SEO. Google makes a token effort to extract keywords from Flash documents, but nothing of the semantic structure is preserved, meaning that Flash pages often find themselves with a much lower search engine ranking. Any solution here needs to come from both Adobe and the search engines - Adobe need to create a solution, or perhaps refine what is available, and the likes of Google and Yahoo need to take responsibility for implementing it. Will it happen? Hopefully, though I wouldn’t put big money on it!The final flash-related technology which I think will make a difference in 2007 is Apollo (just search this blog for more information!). I predict a move to the desktop for more Web applications, and support for offline-mode in many of these applications. Should be fun! (more…)

2006 was the year we finally had a proper update to Internet Explorer - I’m sure everyone would agree that it has been long overdue. Internet Explorer 7 has fixed a number of the more irritating bugs faced by developers, such as the CSS box-model implementation and transparent PNG support. Its just a shame that most of us still have to support earlier versions on their websites! For the users, features such as tabbed browsing and RSS have finally been made available.Firefox 2.0 was also released in November, I’d love to have been more excited by this, but too be honest I see 2.0 as more of a merging of some of the more popular features which were previously available as standalone extensions.So, what do we have to look forward to in 2007? Good question. Firefox 3.0 is on the horizon, though the only thing which excites me is the promise of improved OS X integration and much better font rendering. There will microformat support, probably derived from Operator, though hopefully with a touch of WebCards! I think on the browser side of things, there isn’t really much scope left for innovation - its more polishing the features we all know and love. Any comments? (more…)