Links And Back Button With AJAX

One of the disadvantages of AJAX is that since the entire page is not reloaded, it is not natural to change the link for the page that contains the new information. Which means that the new information cannot be bookmarked! The sites usually work around this by providing a link somewhere on the page which requires the user to take more efforts to first look for it and then bookmark it. Another related disadvantage is that the back button is also broken since the page has not been reloaded. Both these activities are so common that they are a habit for most users. Mike Stenhouse has written a nice tutorial on fixing these two problems (via Evan Williams). Make sure you also read the comments that are trying to make it degrade gracefully when JavaScript is not enabled. My main gripe with AJAX is this – it requires a lot of effort to make it work, be accessible and degrade gracefully. It’s need or it’s benefits should be absolutely justified for a particular case.