I am on the mailing list for Artima Devleoper, which is one of my favorite websites that cover Java/JEE, Dynalangs, and C++. Today's e-mail had a link to a talk by Douglas Crockford who created JSON and Yahoo UI (which I used on my last project) on the state of Ajax. He goes through a bit of computing history (for some reason), and much of the talk is about stuff an experienced web developer would already know. There's a summary and discussion on the Artima forum here.

So, we all know that the fundamental nature of a modern web application is that it uses the web browser to do things it was never designed to do - i.e. maintain state, high levels of user interactivity, communicate significant volumes of data between client and server, the list goes on.. and we do this with a panoply of things we have in our toolbelt such DHTML, Javascript, CSS, XML, Flash/Flex and the server-side technologies. He makes a number of interesting assertions about the direction in which things need to go, as well as why certain solutions failed. For example, he says the following regarding Javascript:

JavaScript has a deeply flawed, unpopular model, but it works in an environment where Java failed really, really hard. That's evidence that despite its flaws, JavaScript is doing something seriously right. The Web requires an especially high level of compatibility, the run everywhere problem, and JavaScript is succeeding there. We have four major browsers, each with a completely different JavaScript engine, and we have high levels of interoperability. That's an amazing achievement

He says the following about CSS (which I never really thought about it, but he may have a point):

This is by far the weakest component in our toolkit. I would like to see this thing pounded into the ground and replaced by something that we can actually use. It did not anticipate any of the interactive stuff that we're trying to do. It was mainly intended for print; it does not even do a good job for print. I think we can do better than this

As Linda Richmond said on Coffee Talk, discuss.