And the Award for Most Superfluous Use Of Ajax in a Mainstream Website goes to….

Ah,.. Ajax. It can be so nifty when it works well, but few technologies can lay a glove on it when it comes to making developers look (IMHO) silly. As Cameron Adams said recently:

Ajax gives web pages the ability to act as desktop applications using invisible data communication and seamless refreshing of individual page elements. This has the potential to either ruin the Web or propel it into a new era.

Here’s a nice example that I think contains a smidgen more from column A and a smidgen less from column B.

Art.com is a large, commerical art site selling prints to the public — over 300,000 of them, framed, mounted or otherwise. Their display pages are a model of efficient elegance — not dissimilar in style to Flickr in some ways — generally letting the artwork speak for itself.

But apparently, there wasn’t enough ‘wow-factor’. “We’re paying these developers — get them to come up with something that’s cool or hot or sick or whatever it is the kids want to be these days”.

So what was their solution?

Dropdowns have been reborn! If you click on a dropdown and expect it to ‘drop‘ ‘down‘ then I’m afraid you are a fool to yourself and a burden to others, my friend. Try the dropdown size selector here and behold the future. The down facing arrow on the dropdown actually means ‘materialize in mid-screen and slide up and left”. Brilliant!

Of course, if you’re not willing/able to run JavaScript, you won’t see so much. Without Javscript enabled, the dropdown doesn’t so much drop down as .. well, provide a nice study in ‘still life’. Being ‘Art.com’, maybe that’s a theme thing.

Hey, I guess the thinking is if you haven’t got JavaScript you’re most likely either weird or broke or both.